William Friedkin’s movies haven’t really been that good since the Seventies. I’m told that To Live and Die in L.A. is pretty good, and personally I recall really liking Jade when I saw it… but it seems he might never reach the highs of The French Connection and The Exorcist.

Rules of Engagement, though, definitely has its moments. There’s a long stretch in the movie where Tommy Lee Jones, defending his old friend Samuel L. Jackson after Jackson is charged with murder following a botched demonstration in Yemen where he ordered troops to open fire on a crowd including innocents, goes back to Yemen to try and find any useful information pertaining to the case… As he wanders around, a young girl keeps appearing, one of the survivors of the incident, and the whole sequence is very reminiscent of Max Von Sydow wandering around Northern Iraq in The Exorcist. There’s also a sort of dream sequence in which Jackson remembers the incident, imagining that the same young girl was among the few armed demonstrators, again reminiscent of the dream sequence in The Exorcist.

Like many courtroom dramas (which this movie ultimately becomes), it does get a little tiring after a while. But the ending is certainly worth the wait, a small reconciliation between strangers that brought a tear to my eye, reminding me of Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, which I guess this whole movie resembles, too.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 8th, 2004 at 7:26 pm in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.