L'enfer du devoir

Years have past since Col Hodges and Col Childers were comrades in combat. Hodges is now retired while Childers is still on active service in the Middle East. When he is called in to help protect and evacuate the US Embassy in the middle of a riot, Childers orders his men to return fire despite not having any definite targets. With a crowd of 80 dead, many women and children, the authorities are forced to go after Childers to have someone to blame. Childers turns to his old friend to help defend him.

With a pair of real heavyweights in lead roles I was quite looking forward to this film. It is quite easy to get into the film as the opening 40 minutes are pretty exciting and shocking in equal measure – it forces you to think where you stand on the action taken by Childers in both past and present. However as the film goes on the moral debate becomes simplified and it is clear where we are being steered, as opposed to being allowed to think things out for ourselves. The `debate' or thoughtful side is lost and we are left with the courtroom drama side of things.

I'm not a big fan of courtroom thrillers as they often rely on unlikely twists at the end and lots of shouting in place of substance. However I do enjoy the odd one if it hangs together and has energy. However, the courtroom scenes here never really get off the ground and surprisingly (given the emotive subject) really lack energy and twists. Even the conclusion of the film is a real damp squid, the verdict is simply delivered, so if you're expecting twists and turns and big revelations forget it. Inexplicably, the film puts up two or three captions over the final shot to tell us more information – for some of these the film would have been much more exciting if it had worked these into the final 20 minutes of the film. To have them as flat words on a screen is pointless (especially since this isn't a true story!).

Jones and Jackson both do good work, as you'd expect for a pair of tough nuts such as they. Jackson has the better character (until the script weakens itself). Pearce is OK in support but the script doesn't give him too much to work with, his side of the case is easy of course, so the film stops him overpowering the court case at the same time as it simplifies it's stance. Support from faces such as Kingsley, Archer, Greenwood and Underwood is OK but in some cases are so brief to be cameos.

Overall this starts well, but it fairs to really involve once the moral debate side of the film is simplified and phased out. The question `what would you do' is rendered null and void with each flashback Jackson has. The courtroom scenes barely fizzle let alone ignite the screen and the film putters to a poor ending that is badly done. Worth seeing with good performances from the leads but still a pretty big disappointment.

Headed by two unnerving performances, this film takes us on a journey through the gray area that is our military morality today. We live in a society insulated from realistic depictions of war. We get censored CNN and FOX news. We rarely get anything insightful, so it is a pleasure to have HOLLYWOOD offer up one of the most moving anti-military films in the past ten years. While the courtroom drama is by all means standard, the most unique attention is paid to the changing perception of TLJ's character. In his journy to defend, he comes to an all too real understanding of a culture whose leaders have no problem sending our boys to die, yet they themselves are either ignorant of the reality, or to politically motivated to be moved by it. In conclusion, this is an alienating film because it presents an alien culture that lives by its own moral code. That alien culture isn't middle eastern... it is our own military.

One more point; Watching this film post 911 gives it an all too creepy reality.

This is a military court martial movie with a few similarities to A Few Good Men. It did not have as much suspense, but overall it was still quite good. I thought the situation in Yemen made it very applicable to current day problems in Arab-American relations. The movie was released before the USS Cole attack, which reinforces the possibility of the event in question in the court-martial. I don't think the massacre that occurred would have been quite so bloody in a real world situation though.

The performances of Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson and Guy Pearce were very good. Probably no Oscars here, but well worth watching.

Last week, as I considered ordering this DVD, I checked the IMDB rating and saw a "fair" 6.5. Since I like Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson, I placed the order. Like most roller coasters, I found it to be a good ride and Jones and Jackson did very credible jobs. The flaws in the movie have been correctly pointed out by numerous other reviewers. I was somewhat surprised that some of the most critical reviews were by US viewers. I fully understand how non-US citizens would be irritated by the stereotypes. I found it to be a very exciting movie from my particular perspective (US citizen, military family, male over 45). The scenes of combat when the marines are ordered to the US embassy in Yemen to safeguard our state department personnel were VERY well done, even to the point of gripping. The court scenes and conflicts of evidence or lack of evidence were interesting to me and I also understood, but did not agree with, the aims of the State Department. I don't think some of the reviewers are aware of what a person might do in such an extremely stressful situation as that of Colonel Childers (Jackson). It was fascinating to me to see what he did do and how he and others looked back on it. I would have given Rules of Engagement a 9 or 10, but for the flaws. It's a good movie though and well worth renting. It's an 8.

I think this is a couple of choices away from being something really special, and I get the sense that the choices made were followed through on at the behest of test screening audiences. I know one of my issues was, and now that I've learned that, I suspect that at least some of the others might be as well. Still, what is there is surprisingly special. William Friedkin makes another courtroom drama, this time based on a script by Stephen Gaghan (originally developed by future Senator James Webb of all people), and the embrace of complexity and unknowingness makes obvious homage to Kurosawa's foundational Rashomon. This isn't at that level, but I think it could have gotten a bit closer had test audiences been able to accept flawed, incomplete answers.

Colonel Hayes Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones) is a desk jockey in the US Marines who is retiring after decades of loyal service which could have led to command instead of a largely unremarkable legal career in the Corps if a key event in his service during Vietnam had gone different. At the Battle of Calou, he and his fellow officer, future Colonel Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson), took their unit in opposite direction where Childers' half survived and Hodges' half was cut to pieces save for him, only saved by Childers taking illegal actions to get the captured North Vietnamese officer (Baoan Coleman) to call off the attack. This, of course, will come back later.

Childers is not retiring, though, and he's given command of a unit on a naval carrier in the Indian Ocean when he's called to a mission in Yemen to save the US Ambassador (Ben Kinglsey) and his family when a local protest starts to get violent. Getting the ambassador out without ordering a shot fired, three of his men fall as the chaos of combat overtakes him, and Childers orders firing directly into the crowd which stops everything.

This opening conflict in Yemen is really one of the key foundational elements of everything, and the fact that Friedkin films it so closely and almost incoherently at first feels like him just falling in with modern action filmmaking techniques alongside people like Michael Bay. However, he has a longer goal in mind: not letting the audience have a clear eye of the action because not having solid evidence of what actually happened is the point. It honestly took me a while to notice that effect, feeling like I had seen stuff that I'm pretty sure Friedkin didn't show in those moments, but it obviously helped form my impressions for what was to come.

Because what is to come is a dissection of Childers and the event with Hodges coming on as his lawyer in the court martial demanded by National Security Advisor Sokal (Bruce Greenwood) in order to try and avoid an international fallout in the Middle East from the images of dead bodies strewn across the Yemeni ground, put there by a US Marine colonel's orders. It doesn't matter if Childers was justified or not, politics demands that Childers be made an example of. The prosecution, Major Biggs (Guy Pearce), is an Ivy League educated lawyer who's never seen combat and is dedicated to taking down Childers.

Not having a really clear image of what happened in front of that embassy is key to how all of this plays out with Hodges going to Yemen to take pictures more than a week after while going over evidence an investigation picked up more than a day after the event. There are no conflicting points of view or flashbacks like in Rashomon, but it has a similar effect where we're supposed to not really know what happened exactly. Which test audiences apparently hated which necessitated the scene of Sokal watching a surveillance tape from the embassy that shows it definitively one particular way. Cut that.

The actual court martial takes up the final third of the film, and it's where Friedkin seems to be most at home. This is about actors working through meaty dialogue with heavy character implications as they jostle over the unknown of the specifics of what happened. Memory, falsified testimony, missing evidence, and documentation, much of which conflicts with each other, and it's supposed to be this unclear view of a complex situation...except that Friedkin gave into the test screening's demands and included the actual footage of the tape that one time. Really, everything else feels so heavily weighted towards one particular conclusion that it feels like the giving in for the tape footage was appealing to the lowest common denominator who wouldn't be interested in the movie to begin with.

As the movie ended, I was still on a very high note, though. I was largely ignoring the existence of the video tape footage and operating like it wasn't really a factor, but as time has gone on since the film ended, my favorability towards the ending waned. It wasn't just the final text which gives a nice bow to everything in a story that probably shouldn't have it, it's the reappearance of the NVA officer, giving testimony about Childers' war record (allowed since Hodges kept bringing it up), and how the NVA officer and Childers view each other one final time. It's going too far in a particular direction, one that seems to have the effect of absolving the military of any crime it ever commits rather than the respect gained over time that I think was the intention.

Anyway, if I had written this review immediately afterwards, I'd rate the film slightly higher. Writing it the morning after, I knock it down slightly. The ending is...off. The use of the video tape footage undermines a lot of the intention of what's going on.

However, outside of that, the rest of the movie is really, really good. The anchor of it all is the two key performances from Jones and Jackson with Jackson providing probably one of his best performances as a man who knows his life is on the line, putting himself in reserve, and needing to get pulled out to reveal the madness within. Jones tends to operate within his own small box of folksy seriousness occasionally punctuated by small guffaws of folksy charm, but he uses it well here as he gets into a situation that he feels is too much for his talents. The supporting cast is really good as well with special notice to Greenwood who is slimy as heck as the NSA and Kingsley who plays such a weak and spineless creature that it feels honestly quite different for him.

Friedkin had what could have been one of his best films of his career, but he (or his producers, I dunno) gave into the demands to make things cleaner in a story about messiness. I'd be interested in some sort of preview cut (a director's cut isn't happening now with Friedkin gone) to see if my issues with the film were there as well. But, it's mostly forgotten and ignored. There will never be any release of a preview cut (which would probably have incomplete audio mixing and a temp score at best), and all I have is the final product.

It's pretty good. I think it's earlier version would have been really good, maybe even great. But the final product is still pretty good.