rules of engagement

Tommy Lee Jones looks good in uniform. In fact, he looks so good, it’s something of a surprise to realise that, the last time he wore it on the big screen was well over five years ago, in Blue Sky. True, he has played ranking officers often enough in the interim: his Oscar-winning performance in The Fugitive, for example, and in that film’s sequel, U.S. Marshals. Similarly, he was a probation officer in last autumn’s hit thriller, Double Jeopardy. But those were all plainclothes roles: this is the real stuff. Plus, says co-star Samuel L Jackson, “he just has that right look of a man who has lived”. In Rules of Engagement, Jones spends most of the movie in uniform. He is trim, authoritative, ramrod stiff, looking like he was born in it. Which is only right, given the background of his character, Colonel Hays Hodges. “He has been in the Marine Corps all his adult life,” explains the 52-year-old Texas-born, Harvard-educated actor, who was cast in his first role (in, of all things, Love Story) while still at college. “His father was a general in the Corps and so was his grandfather. He was in Vietnam in the sixties as a platoon leader, where he was shot up rather badly in a battle and had to come home.”