How's this for chutzpah? Early on, Rules Of Engagement shows U.S. Marines firing into a crowd of protesters—killing 83, including women and children, and wounding many more—and then spends the remainder of its running time attempting to illustrate why the act was justified. So it goes with this repellent military thriller/courtroom drama originally scripted by former Secretary Of The Navy James Webb and directed by William Friedkin. Samuel L. Jackson plays a veteran Marine officer who, on a mission to rescue a cowardly ambassador to Yemen (Ben Kingsley) from an unruly mob, falls under fire. After the aforementioned massacre, Jackson finds himself in hot water and turns to old friend Tommy Lee Jones to bail him out. A military attorney who never quite recovered from Vietnam and unsure of his place in the post-Cold War world order (read: the U.S. military as a whole), Jones reluctantly takes the case. Traveling to Yemen, he encounters a hospital filled with dying children, but his misgivings fly out the window, along with any ambiguity the film possesses, when he discovers that a nefarious national security advisor (Bruce Greenwood) has hidden a videotape showing that, dead children be damned, Jackson might have been justified in his actions. Rules essentially rewrites A Few Good Men from the perspective of Jack Nicholson's character, skirting issues that would seem unavoidable—why the protests? is it ever right to take out a crowd of civilians to eliminate a few gunmen?—and everything else that gets in the way of its ends-always-justify-the-means morality. Jackson and Jones, as has been proved countless times before in better movies, are actors of tremendous gravity. Rules suggests that they might also be highly effective in right-wing propaganda films.