RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Directed by William Friedkin. Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Tommy Lee Jones, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley

Future generations, if there are any future generations, will look back on movies like Rules Of Engagement and feel a chill down their very spines: from Red Dawn through Independence Day and now this, the level of overt America-rules-the-planet fascism on cinematic display has positively gone through the roof.

Director William Friedkin must be incarcerated in a re-education camp without delay. Rarely, if ever, has this planet's accepted Pax Americana been hammered home so brutally and unapologetically.

The following plot synopsis may give you some inkling of how odious this movie is: Marine Samuel L. Jackson is a hero of the Vietnam War, having saved Tommy Lee Jones from certain death by ambush. Flash-forward to the present, and Jackson leads a team of Marines into Yemen, where the US embassy is under threat from a particularly menacing-looking bunch of ungrateful natives screaming 'ji-had! ji-had!'. When three Marines are killed, Jackson orders his unit to open fire on the angry crowd, resulting in the wanton slaughter of eighty-three people (obviously a fair going rate for three Marines) which then becomes base material for the most stunning cinematic justification of war-criminal savagery ever to pass the censor.

Back in Washington, a ludicrously fey, almost Blair-esque National Security Adviser takes note of the massacre, offers not one expression of remorse for the victims and pins the whole affair on Jackson.

Poor old persecuted mass-murderer Jackson's already-uphill legal battle is then made more so by his choice of lawyer (old buddy Jones, now a washed-up drunk) who would appear to be no match for Washington's shit-hot military attorney (a ruthlessly-ambitious Guy Pearce). Jackson actually puts considerable effort into his role, and is never less than convincing – but he's fighting a one-man battle, with Jones and Pearce sinking virtually without trace.

Eventually, this minor 83-people-murdered-by-foreign troops murk is neatly cleaned up when it transpires that the cute, puppy-eyed Yemeni girl hopping around on one leg thanks to the Marine Corps' merciful benevolence was, in actual fact, a gun-wielding Islamic fanatic.

Hence, the film's inherent logical leap of faith: even the so-called 'innocent' women and children were without doubt thoroughly evil anti-American maniacs who got their just desserts. As one UK-based critic recently remarked of the film, without any apparent trace of irony: 'to British eyes, it's like the Paras being tried for Bloody Sunday'. Quite.

Avoid this as you would mad-cow disease.