Lion for Lambs

No thinking person could doubt that the issues raised in this puzzling film are worth dwelling on. The three parallel stories that comprise Lions for Lambs deal with the growing political complacency of American youth, the dwindling options for military success in Afghanistan, the corruption of news media, and the galloping arrogance of the political elite.

Robert Redford is right to be concerned about such things. Maybe he should consider making a film about them sometime.

Some critics have suggested that Lions for Lambs is so talky and static it would have worked better in the theatre. The operating theatre, perhaps. The thing should render viewers so soundly unconscious that kidneys and spleens can be removed without causing any significant discomfort to the patient.

Matthew Michael Carnahan's script offers us two dull conversations - both across a desk - and one unconvincing action sequence that looks as if it were filmed in a small room near Burbank. The first chat finds Redford's crinkly liberal professor trying to convince an intelligent student to get off his couch and engage with the political issues of the day. The second follows an archetypically evil Republican senator (three-piece suit, arrogant posture, Tom Cruise's head) as he talks Meryl Streep's disillusioned journalist through a new military strategy aimed at ending the Afghan conflict. While all this chatter is going on, two former students of Redford's, now soldiers, are fighting for their lives in the Hindu Kush.

The good intentions blaze off the screen, and you might well argue that the presence of Tom Cruise may bring in a mainstream audience and get them thinking about the issues. Unhappily, the picture is so lacking in forward narrative and so reliant on plodding, schematic argument that it will scare most Top Gun enthusiasts out of the cinema and straight back to the numbing comfort of their X-Boxes.

Even the battle sequences are dull. Indeed, the supposedly touching tale of two pals who went to school together and then headed off to war appears to have been modelled on Two Little Boys by Rolf Harris.

It's all too depressing for words. Listen to what Professor Redford has to say, kids. Read a book. Read a newspaper. But steer well clear of the movie. DONALD CLARKE