The movie depicts the razor’s edge our military warriors walk in the situation of official peace but worldwide turmoil. When we send our men and women into combat, we call up a visceral, tribal, horrible force to maim and slaughter, but always within a channeling framework of discipline and rules. The modern soldier does not work in a world of isolated military engagement reported home by a team of patriotic journalists trying to fan the fires of hope for victory. Today’s soldiers fight in the glare of CNN cameras and under the direction of political strategists who may just find the soldier expendable, a pawn to be sacrificed in larger schemes.

Col. Childers becomes that expendable hero. Near the end of an illustrious combat career, he is accused of murder for his command of a squad sent to rescue a besieged US Embassy in Yemen. Under heavy fire and having sustained casualties, Childers orders his troops to fire on the demonstrators.

His battle then continues in the courtroom. Childres’s lawyer is his old buddy, Col. Hays Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones). They were both Lieutenants in the jungles of Vietnam where Childers saved Hodges in the wild and maddening chaos of a firefight. This opening sequence shows Childers taking a decisive, dramatic action that breaks the rules of engagement, but an action necessary within the framework of a losing battle with his comrades at arms dropping like flies.

One of the strongest points of this fine film is that the courtroom scenes are interspersed with different aspects of battle and investigative realities. We see Childers’s actions from different perspectives. We are first masterfully led to agree with Childers’s accusers as our perception is limited and our opinion shaped by what we have not seen. Even Hodges returns from his investigation in Yemen convinced that Childers may have crossed the line.

Ultimately, though we as an audience know aspects of the correctness of Childers’s position, he can’t prove it. The evidence is lost, witnesses are dead, and the government officials plot to destroy Childers to appease international calls for a scapegoat. Knowing the truth that might set a man free, but not being able to prove it is a superb presentation of one of the most maddening aspects of judicial proceedings. As viewers, we wanted to scream because we knew facts that the jury of officers, the judge, and the prosecutors do not know, would never know.

Childers and his actions, however, are not without taint. No matter how justified he may seem with our knowledge of what really happened, he made mistakes and his words condemn him. In battle, as in life, imperfect choices that have tragic consequences are made in the heat of difficult circumstances. Yet, Col. Childers is a man of honor, valor, and courage. He did the best he could, and though he may have been beyond the letter of the rules that govern him, he was always within their spirit.

Many might expect Rules of Engagement to climax in the courtroom showdown between Hodges and National Security Advisor (Bruce Greenwood), who destroyed the crucial evidence that would have exonerated Childers, but the movie derives its power from engaging our frustration and helplessness as we witness how strict adherence to the rules of courtroom battle comes so very close to actually destroying all that we hold dear.

On a social consciousness note, particularly in light of the attention being paid to the illustrious career of Sydney Poitier, we note that the main character is a black man. In a key battle scene, the Captain is also a black man, and yet, there was not one shred of inference that any virtue or vice was related to the race of the men. This serves as a testament to the ground that Mr. Poitier broke and that brought Mr. Jackson a role in which it matters not who is coming to dinner.