September 30, 2008
'Lions for Lambs'
Rating: 
Probe beneath the din of heated rhetoric and impassioned banter that makes up "Lions for Lambs" and you can feel the exasperation of its director/co-star Robert Redford and writer Matthew Michael Carnahan ("The Kingdom") as they haul this unwieldy polemic into the mainstream. It's as if the movie were saying to its audience: After all the documentaries and dramatizations detailing all the lamentable fallout of American foreign policy since 9/11, you still don't seem to be listening. So we're going to stop showing and just start telling, if necessary, even yelling this stuff in your ears.
So what we have here isn't a drama so much as a dramatized position paper in three parts: One has Tom Cruise as an oil-slick Republican senator vetting a "new strategy" in the war against terror to a skeptical TV newswoman. Another shows the first strains of this strategy coming to grief in the snowbound Afghan mountains as a pair of wounded GIs (Derek Luke, Michael Pena) are encircled by hostile Taliban. In the third piece, the soldiers' onetime political science professor (Redford) scolds a promising but apathetic student (Andrew Garfield) into taking a stand, any stand.
It's difficult to know what's more implausible: that a committed hawk like Cruise's character would try to sell his line to someone as jadedly incredulous as Streep's world-weary liberal or that two prized pupils of Redford's would defer promising futures in the political arena (where, being minorities, they would be sorely needed) to become embedded in the Middle East mess.
But plausibility isn't as important to "Lions for Lambs" as covering its talking points, among them the media's complicity in selling the Republican war policy and the ways in which those in power thrive on the cynicism of those who might otherwise productively challenge The Way Things Are.
These and other issues are worthy of delineation and debate. Whether those seeing such themes played out in dark rooms that smell like popcorn will appreciate the movie's earnestness remains to be seen. Or maybe not. How for instance, did "Rendition" end up doing at the box office?
Of the three icons lending their auras to this project, Cruise ends up, oddly, making the biggest impression. (As has been said in show biz since Shakespeare's day, the devil always gets the best lines.) Imagine what "Mission: Impossible's" cocky Ethan Hunt or "Top Gun's" cockier Maverick Mitchell would be like with a political agenda and a lust for power and you have an alarming, all-too-conceivable vision of what could conquer the red states - and a few blue ones as well.
LIONS FOR LAMBS (R). Icons Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford (who also directs) lend their auras to this staged - and stagy - three-pronged critique of political action and reaction in the Age of Terror. With Derek Luke, Michael Pena, Andrew Garfield, Peter Berg and Kevin Dunn. 1:30 (violence, scattered vulgarities). At area theaters.
Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.
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