Unacceptable forces

Rules of Engagement (15) General release

It's a long, long time since former 1970s movie brat William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) has had a bona fide hit, but apparently he has scooped a modest jackpot in the US with this military legal thriller, constructed as a vehicle for its two granite-jawed stars, Samuel Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. Which is a pity, because under the surface of a functional, competent courtroom drama, there's something rather nasty lurking.

Jackson and Jones are marines, former comrades from the Vietnam War, when the former saved the latter's life. Now they're both colonels, but of rather different sorts: Jackson a dashing, gung-ho leader of Special Task Forces; Jones an alcoholic with a failed marriage and disappointing legal career behind him. Then Jackson and his men are helicoptered into the US embassy in Yemen to protect the diplomats from a potentially dangerous mob of demonstrators. Coming under attack from snipers on the rooftops surrounding the embassy, Jackson decides that the shooting is also coming from the crowd, and orders his troops to open fire, killing 80 men, women and children. In the ensuing international furore, he is chosen as scapegoat by the nefarious National Security Advisor and court-martialled on a murder charge. For some inexplicable (and never explained) reason, he chooses the pathetic Jones as his defence counsel.

Friedkin unfolds this sorry tale with a minimum of subtlety or sensitivity - we always know on which side our sympathies are expected to lie - although he waits until near the end before showing us what the crowd was "really" doing. There's a half-hearted McGuffin in the shape of a video surveillance tape which might exonerate Jackson, but which is commandeered by the bad guys. Some dreadful macho-bonding sequences (including, for the first time in years, one of those scenes where the old pals beat the crap out of each other before collapsing, reconciled, into each other's arms) do little to advance the plot, although the courtroom sequences are given some zip by the presence of Guy Pearce as a tight-lipped inquisitor.

But it's the moral vacuum at the core of Rules of Engagement which gives cause for concern. As the title implies, the point at issue in the trial is the question of appropriate military force in a conflict. Since none of the protagonists in the trial have the audience's privileged view of what actually happened, they must be swayed by Jackson's sole testimony and, implicitly, by the argument that sometimes a soldier has no choice but to shoot unarmed civilians if he believes they pose a danger. However well this may play in the American heartlands, one wonders what cinema-goers in, say, Derry will think of it. And if they do make that connection, they may also question the absurdly one-dimensional portrayal of Muslims. In fact, the film almost works as a sort of weird negative image of Bloody Sunday, in which the crowd on the streets was full of gunmen and the commanding officer was charged with murder. Except that, this being Hollywood, there's an ending which would have done the late Lord Widgery proud.

Final Destination (15) General release

After Rules of Engagement, it's something of a relief to turn to Final Destination, a story in which hundreds of people perish horribly in the first 10 minutes, and Death with a capital D stalks the survivors for the rest of the movie. This is a rather enjoyable slice of supernatural teen hokum, blessedly free of the self-referential tics of the Screams, I Know What You Dids and the rest of them. Devon Sawa is 17-year-old Alex, on his way with the rest of his high school classmates on an educational trip to Paris. Moments before take-off, he has a vivid premonition that the plane will crash and demands to get off. In the ensuing brouhaha, four other students and a teacher are removed before the flight leaves and, inevitably, explodes. In the wake of the tragedy, Sawa becomes an object of fear and suspicion to his surviving peers and their parents, and things go from very bad to much worse when the survivors themselves start to die. The Grim Reaper, it appears, does not like to be cheated and is determined not to let a mere premonition spoil his passenger manifest.

Final Destination is the directorial debut of James Wong, a veteran of many X-Files episodes, and there is something X-File-ish about its mixture of suburbia and the supernatural. It's a relief to come across a teen horror movie that doesn't involve hooded psychopaths hiding in closets with big knives. The depiction of Death as a malevolent entity controlling the natural world is not particularly well thought through, and the plot starts springing serious leaks in the last couple of reels, but this is an unassuming chiller, enthusiastically performed by a young cast of unfamiliar faces. One word of warning: if you're nervous about flying, you should probably stay away - the passenger's-eye-view of the crash is scarifying.

My Dog Skip (PG) General release

The title tells you most of what you need to know about this slushy rites-of-passage story set in 1940s Mississippi. The winsome Frankie Muniz plays a shy nine-year-old whose life is changed when he gets a Jack Russell terrier as a birthday present. A number of gentle adventures follow, but the Norman Rockwellisms soon become grating in what is apparently a true story (based on author Willie Morris's memoir of his childhood). Director Jay Russell heaps on the all-American iconography, and there's a surprisingly hefty supporting cast (Kevin Bacon, Diane Lane, Luke Wilson), but one wonders what contemporary Irish kids will make of this exercise in low-key nostalgia.

Beyond the Pale (Club IFC, Dublin)

Showing at the IFC until Sunday night, this independently-produced, New York-set film ploughs a furrow made increasingly familiar in recent years by such titles as Gold in the Streets, Two by Four, Exiled and Sun- burn. Like all those films, Beyond the Pale sets out to dramatise the experiences of those Irish emigrants who have travelled to the US since the mid-1980s in search of money, work, success, freedom, sex, drugs, guns, fun or whatever. It's an odd little subgenre, often as interesting in what it fails to do as in its successes (perhaps the IFC might consider running a mini-season of these movies some weekend?). The tensions between the autobiographical impulse and the desire to make a "proper" film with some commercial potential are often to the fore, but at their best these stories have a raw energy and a ring of truth which carries them through their rougher patches.

In many ways, Beyond the Pale is the most formally and stylistically conservative example of the species since the underwhelming, Noel Pearson-produced Gold in the Streets. Telling the story of Patrick (Patrick Clarke, who also produced and co-wrote the script), a young Dubliner who leaves his job as a stableboy in Ireland to head for New York with dreams of making his fortune, it follows the familiar narrative arc of initial optimism, harsh reality and ultimate disillusionment. Made on a tiny budget, it's a surprisingly handsome-looking production, thanks to the compositions of director George Bazala and cinematographer Adam Vardy. But the acting is wildly uneven, and the script wince-makingly sententious at times.