Samuel L Jackson Month - Mini Review: Rules of Engagement

Time for another entry into Samuel L Jackson month

This time we’ll be looking at a war/crime drama called Rules of engagement. Let’s have a look at the cast

Obviously, we have Samuel L motherf*cking Jackson as the lead role

We have Two Face from Batman Forever – Tommy Lee Jones

We have Batman from Young Justice – Bruce Greenwood

And we have Ben Kingsley, who really keeps showing up in these reviews

Amongst others of course

The film was not met with great critical reception, only a 35% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, 6.4 on IMdB and 45% on Metacritic. It saw moderate success at the Box Office despite this.

So… what’s the story?

War Veteran Colonel Childers (Played by Jackson) is sent to evacuate the US Ambassador in Yemen, the Embassy had come under attack by protesters. Childer’s gave his men orders to fire into the crowd, seeing that they were taking fire from below as well as from some rooftop snipers. The result ended in the dead 82 men, women and children with no sign of any weapons upon them.

Childers is being Court-marshalled and selects old comrade Colonel Hodges, who had studied law after suffering injuries in Vietnam, to be his defence. The evidence pours in and statements are taken but can they confront the people behind the scenes wanting to sabotage this case?

Let’s be clear, this isn’t an action movie. The fights all take place in the first 15 minutes of the movie and the rest is building up to and displaying the trial. They chose a great lawyer for the government, I wanted to punch him in the face the first time I met him and honestly – he has no involvement in corrupting the trial. He genuinely believed Childers to be guilty and only wanted clean evidence and was unwilling to consider the death penalty – and I still want to punch him.

The problem is the majority of the evidence presented at the trial is insignificant or inconclusive. It seemed like they were taking it in turns to destroy the other’s evidence. The key to this trial is a suspiciously missing tape. Hodges found an operational CCTV camera in the embassy with a view of the crowd and evidence that proved one tape from the Embassy was sent to the US, yet the lawyer from the defence denies such a tape existing because he’s a moron like that.

The fact is, the other evidence doesn’t prove sh*t beyond reasonable doubt. Now, I’m not saying they should have been open, Bill Sokal, the US security adviser didn’t want to risk war with Yemen, but he could have been less sloppy in doing so. This was easily traced back to him and yes, he was eventually charged with withholding/destroying evidence.

OK, I’ve danced around this issue long enough. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee described it as "probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs by Hollywood." And here’s the rebuttal from the director (I’m getting this off Wikipedia so inaccuracies may follow)

“Let me state right up front, the film is not anti-Arab, is not anti-Muslim and is certainly not anti-Yemen. In order to make the film in Morocco, the present King of Morocco had to read the script and approve it and sign his name ... and nobody participating from the Arab side of things felt that the film was anti-Arab. The film is anti-terrorist. It takes a strong stand against terrorism and it says that terrorism wears many faces ... but we haven’t made this film to slander the government of Yemen. It's a democracy and I don’t believe for a moment they support terrorists any more than America does”

Let me make a stand on this one. There were reports about terrorists implementing the demonstrations, there were tapes about terrorists, the problem is we really don’t get counterbalanced by any positive representations of Arabs, so it’s not hard to see why the America-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee saw it the way they did. However, I don’t believe that was their intention, they say nothing specifically racist in the movie, any racism is implied and open to interpretation in fact it’s pretty likely a lot of Arab people were innocent in this.

And I suppose I oughta mention the one scene where Hodges is mobbed by lots of angry Arabs, not one of them pull any weapon on him, not one of them cause him much in the ways of physical harm, and their anger is actually kinda justified in that.

My opinion is that movie is kinda dull, but we do have lots of swearing. Time to get to the motherf*ck counter. There are, and I’m not kidding here, 8 utterances of the word, bringing the total to 9

Rating: 45/100 

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Images/clips used in this review are from Rules of Engagement and Avengers: Age of Ultron and Avengers Assemble (The Avengers) and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use