Pretty soon we’re just going to have movies in which celebrities stand in front of the camera and lecture audiences for 90 minutes. That’s already practically what’s going on in Lions for Lambs, an insulting, pedantic and inert movie that’s one of year’s worst. There have been a lot of mainstream narrative films recently that deal with the conflict in the Middle East, and if nothing else they generally have good intentions. But all the good intentions in the world can’t make up for Lions’ complete failure as drama, or its wooden, statistics-laden dialogue that comes off more like dueling position papers than actual human beings having a conversation.
The film switches among three intersecting stories, two of which involve little more than people sitting in a room and debating issues. A world-weary reporter (Meryl Streep) interviews an ambitious young senator (Tom Cruise) about a new military strategy in Afghanistan, while an equally world-weary college political-science professor (Robert Redford, who also directed) debates a jaded student (Andrew Garfield) who refuses to engage with class material. Meanwhile, a pair of soldiers (Michael Pena, Derek Luke) are shot down and stranded on a mountain in Afghanistan. They’re former students of the strident professor, acting out the senator’s new campaign against terrorism.
Streep and Cruise and Redford and Garfield bandy stale ideas about listlessly, parroting clichés that have been talked to death dozens of times on cable-news shows for years. Redford’s professor doesn’t understand why kids today don’t care about what’s going on in the world around them; Garfield’s student thinks that all politicians are hypocritical scumbags. Streep’s reporter blames the government for lying to the American public, while Cruise’s senator blames the media for sensationalizing the war. And on and on and on. Redford shoots these limp back-and-forths in the most pedestrian, boring way possible, while his characters barely even move as they deliver their competing monologues.
The acting in these two segments is almost redundant, since none of the players are given any emotion or personality to bring out in their characters. Instead, they simply spout opinion-column facts and figures; at one point, during a flashback sequence, the two soldier characters actually give a presentation complete with overhead slides that cite numbers from various policy studies. When their classmates laugh at their earnestness, it’s hard not to want to laugh along with them (it doesn’t help that the movie depicts some of the least realistic college classes of all time).
At least the two soldiers actually get to move around and see some action; their segment, which features a race against time to rescue them before insurgent forces find where they’ve been stranded, has a reasonable amount of suspense. But every time he builds up a bit of excitement, Redford cuts back to the talking heads, immediately replacing tension with tedium. And the soldiers’ final fate is as hokey and heavy-handed as anything else in the movie.
It’s almost hard to believe that this movie was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, writer of the equally political but far superior The Kingdom, which wrapped its message in exciting action and interesting characters. Whether it’s simply Redford’s rustiness as a director (this is his first time behind the camera in seven years) or a desire to make a serious film rather than an action spectacle, Lions fails in almost every possible way, and exposes its simplistic politics in the same way that The Kingdom’s style made up for them. Rather than reasoned thought and debate, the only thing this movie inspires is exasperation.
Lions for Lambs
*
Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Michael Pena, Derek Luke
Directed by Robert Redford
Rated R
Opens Friday