A knee-jerk valentine to American military honor, carefully disguised as a scrupulous examination of the split-second decisions that define courage under fire. Marines Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) and Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones) served together in
Vietnam, where Childers saved Hodges' life. Twenty-eight years later, Colonel Hodges, now a military lawyer, is retiring, while Colonel Childers remains on active duty, an éminence grise in a Corps he hardly recognizes. While on routine duty in the Gulf of Aden, Childers is ordered to the
American embassy in Yemen; it's surrounded by hostile protesters, and Childers' orders are to assess the situation and, if necessary, evacuate Ambassador Mourain (Ben Kingsley) and his family. Things get very ugly, very fast: The Marines find themselves under fire from rooftop snipers, the crowd
below is hurling rocks and molotov cocktails, and the ambassador is in a panic. When the dust clears, Childers has ordered his men to fire on the crowd, and 83 apparently unarmed Yemeni citizens — including women and children — are dead. Childers swears the crowd was full of gunmen, and
asks Hodges to defend him at his court martial. The movie's climax, an extended courtroom sequence driven by the question of whether Childers is lying when he asserts that the crowd was armed, recalls the popular and smartly written A FEW GOOD MEN. But far from condemning the notion that a uniform
grants exemption from the law, this film, efficiently directed by William Friedkin, panders to some very unattractive impulses. They include America's yen for kick-ass heroes who only kill bad guys; our national resentment that the whole world hates us for reasons we don't understand; and our
populist need to see an individual win against perfidious big government and its weasely concerns. It's a deftly executed crowd-pleaser, but it's dishonest to the core. --Maitland McDonagh
