Disengaged

Rating: 1/10 (21 October 2001)

SPOILERS COMING UP: DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW IF YOU'RE INTENDING TO SEE THIS MOVIE
New to UK satellite television's Box Office pay-to-view channel, this movie comes with a cautionary warning from the channel that 'in view of recent events', viewers may find 'certain scenes upsetting'. Well yes. Almost all of 'em, in fact. But they're upsetting less on account of any contemporary resonance that might echo in the wake of 9/11 -- truth to tell, there isn't any such resonance, anyway -- and rather more because of the realisation that one has coughed up £3 25p in order to view a movie with so little idea of the rules of engagement where audiences are concerned that writer and director ought to get back (or possibly,enroll) in the nearest neighbourhood film school as soon as possible.
The plot is downright daft, the characterisation awful, and the script, dire. Jackson's military hero is self evidently anything but, and Jones's about-to-retire-in-two-weeks-lawyer straight from a cupboard in central casting (the shelf below the about-to-retire-in-two-weeks detective).
For Jones in particular, the about-to-retire bit is inadvertently cruel: in the preliminary 1968 flashback shot he already looks as though he was born with the century, his noble visage defeating all of Friedkin's technical wizardry -- i.e., getting the actor to wear an oversize hat to cover most of his face -- to assert otherwise.
When it isn't daft, it's risible: a couple of weeks after being machine-gunned and having one of her legs amputated, the six-year-old victim is out of hospital and miraculously adept with her crutches (whilst other victims of the same blood bath still lay in their hospital beds with the same bullet holes and blood stains).
An evil National Security Adviser (well yes, he would have to be evil, wouldn't he?) steals a video tape that wouldn't have excused Jackson's behaviour anyway, even though the film plainly thinks so.
Lawyer and hero have a Wayne/McGaglan-style fight after the lawyer realises how indefensible his client truly is, and then having rolled around smashing each other up and the studio set, bond together in macho male laughter. Appealing? Right. Nothing like having a laugh with a mass murderer to cement an audience's sympathy.
And so it goes on: incredbility piled on incredibility, the film with neither a moral core nor even a moral fix on its cardboard characters.
Someone, somewhere though, evidently thought audiences would be engaged by this dross and leave their brains behind: an excruciatingly awful end credit sequence actually has the temerity to chronicle the post-film fate of the movie's characters -- National Security adviser arrested, Ambassador arrested, military hero acquitted of all charges --as if for one moment anyone could ever believe them to approximate to real people.
Unfortunately, the only reality of Rules of Engagement is its utter awfulness. Amidst so much gunfire and blood letting, the loudest sound is of Friedkin shooting himself in the foot.