Lazy, lazy filmmaking.

Rating: Null/10 (16 September 2000)

Friedkin has made some great movies ("Exorcist," "French Connection"). This is not one of them. His earlier works were novel, marked by a fresh creative spark; this, on the other hand, is a very tired, predictable, formulaic rehashing of familiar elements. It's not even a familiar tale well told; it's just lazy filmmaking at its worst.
Jones and Jackson, two of the most engaging and charismatic actors today, are given the impossible task of bringing depth to characters that are two-dimensional cutouts we've seen a thousand times before. The writers have not created living and breathing humans, but rather a hodgepodge of walking stereotypes devoid of any elements that would make them interesting, much less worthy of our emotional investment. Their behaviors are completely predictable, yet often strained, awkward, and unbelievable. Their relationship leads one to conclude that the writers attended Syd Field's screenwriting workshop and learned What To Include without learning How to Include It. There's the standard "You gotta help me, nobody else believes me," the painfully contrived Fight Between Best Buddies That Threatens To Undermine Their Just Cause, and the inevitable Why-didn't-you-tell-me-this-sooner-and-what-else-are-you-keeping-from-me.
Secondary characters, such as the National Security Advisor, are also drawn with breathtaking shallowness. This is not a unique individual with strengths and weaknesses, with good and bad, with virtues and vices. Here instead is a stereotypical bureaucrat-villain-really-really-Evil-guy whose great challenge to the very capable Bruce Greenwood is the hiding of the glue holding his cardboard pieces together. The character of the Ambassador similarly wastes the formidable talents of Ben Kingsley. "Two-dimensional" is too generous a term to be applied to the character as it is written.
Sadly, the same clumsiness and laziness that mark the development of the characters also mark the development of the story. The courtroom scenes are breathtaking not only in their lack of originality, but in their arbitrariness. Our mind is kept wondering not what twist or turn the story will next bring, but rather what contrived element the storyteller will next try to foist upon us. The fight scene between Jones' and Jackson's characters is painfully unmotivated, arising not from the characters, but apparently from the screenwriters' sense of the obligatory. Worst of all, the plot twist thrown at the end is offensive not because it could not have happened in real life, but because of the way it was handled by the filmmakers. Like everything else about the film, it does not flow naturally from within; instead, it is imposed from without by the writers. Properly conceived twists--think "The Sixth Sense" or "The Usual Suspects"--add richness, complexity, and an entirely new level of fulfillment to already good stories. Then there are twists that leave the viewer feeling cheated. This is one of those, reducing most of the preceding 120-odd minutes to much ado about nothing.
"Rules of Engagement" could have been a fine film about important issues. Instead, it is lazy, lazy storytelling that wastes the talents of the filmmakers and the time of the viewers.