A Couple of Comments

Rating: 10/10 (8 August 2001)

Let me begin by saying that I thought "Rules of Engagement" was excellent. I'd compare the comments by others to those made about "Dirty Harry." Left-wingers hate(d) it; right-wingers love(d) it. I'm a right-winger, so I loved it.
Concerning two points that several reviewers have made:
1. Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson looked the same age in the Vietnam sequence (allegedly taking place 28 years ago) as they did in the later parts of the movie: surely this better establishes the characters. If two younger men had been cast to play Childers and Hodges as 20-somethings, it would have been necessary to use some sort of voice-over or title card device to explain that these two 20-somethings are now 50-something.
2. How did they find the Vietnamese colonel? I don't have any military experience myself, but it's my impression that the military (in all countries) is as bureaucratic an organization as it is possible to conceive. Since the location of the battle in the first scene was known, surely the prosecutors could have found out from the Vietnamese government who was in charge of that patrol; the Vietnamese government (remember, they won that war, so would have had no need to destroy their records) would have been, one presumes, only too happy to help, since the Jackson character murdered (no doubt about that; when you shoot an unarmed man in the head from up close, it's murder, whether justifiable or not) one of their men.
In closing, let me say that I thought the scene at the end where the Vietnamese colonel salutes Childers, who salutes back, was magnificent. Both times I've seen the movie, I get goosebumps at that point. What the movie is saying at that point is that soldiers on opposite sides in a war have more in common with each other than either has with the politicians back home.