Movie Review: Lions for Lambs - The Crime library

Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep in Lions for Lambs

Most movies try to entertain us. A few movies try to educate us. Lions for Lambs tries to do both but falls short on both counts. Despite an all-star cast that includes Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, the film is more concerned with raising issues about the war on terror than sweeping the audience away with a riveting story. There are combat scenes of Americans fighting Taliban mujahideen in the mountains of Afghanistan, but like every other scene in the film, it packs all the punch of a PowerPoint presentation. You learn something, but it doesn't grab you.

Lions for Lambs, directed by Robert Redford, follows three plot strands, each one dealing in one way or another with the United States' response to 9/11. In one, Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise), a bright-eyed Republican war hawk, summons veteran reporter Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) to his office to give her an exclusive on a new military strategy for the war in Afghanistan. The reporter is skeptical and mistrustful of the administration's ability to pull it off. But the senator has the irrepressible zeal of a televangelist and the smarts to deflect her liberal objections. He manages to turn the tables on her, indicting the media for lowering the bar in news coverage, arguing that they were crucial in selling the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the American public. The reporter leaves Irving's office with an acute case of self-doubt. Cruise is outstanding as the powerhouse politician whose hairdo, ironically, is a replica of Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards' $400 haircut. Senator Irving is the kind of cocky character Cruise usually plays, but in this context it works to perfection.

Robert Redford

The second plot line concerns a college political-science professor (Robert Redford) and a bright but unmotivated student (Andrew Garfield). The professor tells the student that he should become engaged with the world around him and do something with his life that really matters. Their scenes take place in the professor's office, the characters talking across a desk—yes, it's that exciting.

Michael Pena and Derek Luke in Lions for Lambs

The third plot thread is intertwined with the second, following two young men who decide to enlist in the Army and do their part in the war on terrorism. They were both students of the political-science professor who inspired them to engage with the world. But joining the army was not exactly what he had in mind. The two young men (Derek Luke and Michael Pena) are part of the troop surge that Senator Irving reveals to the reporter, but things don't go well for the them, and they end up stranded on a snowy mountain with Taliban fighters closing in. What should be the most suspenseful part of the film is as flat as the wordy parts. By the time this sequence comes around, we know that these characters are just props for the points the filmmakers want to make. They represent ideas not real people. Luke, who made his mark in Antoine Fisher, and Pena, whose character here is vaguely reminiscent of the trapped and injured Port Authority Police officer he played in World Trade Center, are both able actors, but their action scenes are dragged down by the surrounding didactic ones. By this time the audience can no longer avoid the filmmakers' agenda. The combat scenes become just more content in the PowerPoint presentation.

It's no accident that director Redford chose to cast himself as the professor. I kept waiting for the movie to freeze on the screen and Redford to step out onto the stage in the flesh to guide a classroom discussion. Lions for Lambs has the feel of a teaching tool.

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By Anthony Bruno