project over to Richard Zanuck, who then hired Stephen Gaghan to work on the screenplay. Webb hated Gaghan's work and frustrated the filmmaker's attempts to receive cooperation from the Department of Defense, which was eventually obtained nonetheless. Filming Location shooting took place in Morocco, Nokesville, Virginia, Warrenton, Virginia (military base scenes), Hunting Island, South Carolina (Vietnam scenes), and Mount Washington, Virginia (Gen. Hodges' estate scenes). Reception Critical response On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, of critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of . The site's critical consensus reads: "The script is unconvincing and the courtroom action is unengaging." On Metacritic it has a score of 45% based on reviews from 31 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "A-" on scale of A to F. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, gave it two and a half out of four stars, praising its "expert melodrama" while criticizing an "infuriating screenplay". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that the film was "lazily plotted, grotesquely dishonest, and dripping with a creepy strain of Islamophobia". Charles Gittins, writing from a legal perspective for CNN, wrote that "the movie succeeds in capturing the details of a successful military operation and showing the possible political fallout from such an operation. The drama lags, however, once it enters the courtroom where Rules of Engagement is neither accurate nor compelling." The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee described it as "probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs by Hollywood", comparing it with The Birth of a Nation and The Eternal Jew. Director William Friedkin, dismissed accusations that the film was racist: Let me state right up front, the film is not anti-Arab, is not anti-Muslim and is certainly not anti-Yemen. In order to make the film in Morocco, the present King of Morocco had to read the script and approve it and sign his name ... and nobody participating from the Arab side of things felt that the film was anti-Arab. The film is anti-terrorist. It takes a strong stand against terrorism and it says that terrorism wears many faces ... but we haven't made this film to slander the government of Yemen. It's a democracy and I don't believe for a moment they support terrorists any more than America does. Friedkin later stated the film "was a box office hit but many critics saw it as