THE Patriot has already got up noses with its rampant American flag waving. Now it is the turn of the equally offensive Rules Of Engagement, a gung-ho exercise in warped jingoism that was a long time in coming to Britain but still arrived too soon.

Rules Of Engagement - a very Eighties title, don't you think - is essentially A Few Good Men without a few good performances as the ethics of the military and government worlds clash in the courtroom.

Facing a court martial for murder is Colonel Terry Childers (Samuel L Jackson), a veteran marine with 30 years of medal-decorated service.

Sent to Yemen on a rescue mission with the American Embassy under fire from Muslim snipers, he saves the Ambassador (Ben Kingsley), and the American flag naturally, but then orders his troops to shoot the rioting throng in the square below. Men, women and children. Collateral damage report: 83 dead.

The American government has blood and a volatile Middle Eastern incident on its hands, and it needs someone to take the rap. That someone is Childers, and conveniently the National Security office destroys the evidence that would form the centrepiece of his defence: the embassy tape that shows rioters, children and women among them, firing from the square.

So Childers calls on the long dormant legal skills of the heavy boozer he served under in Vietnam. Cynical Colonel Hayes Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones) has never been the same in the head since his experiences in Vietnam - shown in flashback by director William Friedkin, whose work in the combat zones is the most proficient aspect of this far-too simplistic legal thriller.

There is no intelligence in the cement-booted dialogue of Rules Of Engagement, with Childers' defence merely coming down to his mantra of protecting his men. Strangely, issues of morality do not come into play, and so the courtroom crossfire is as superficial as Friedkin's depiction of the rioters as "ragheads, camel jockeys and goons". Guy Pearce's ascetic prosecution lawyer is similarly burdened with clichs, resulting in a lack of memorable head-to-heads to rival Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men.

Jackson looks out of sorts in military fatigues and merely goes through his stock of edgy, angry motions; the normally methodical Jones forgets his war-wound limp as this leaden film progresses, and Rules Of Engagement becomes Rules Of Disengagement, such is the absence of tension. By comparison, this year's Iraqi heist movie Three Kings looks a work of military genius.