Lions for Lambs



Directed by
Robert Redford

Matthew Michael Carnahan, who both wrote and directed the brilliant action flick “The Kingdom” has decided to further explore our relegations with the Moslem World, with a wordy debate of sorts with some explosions added in to keep the audience from falling asleep. Whether or not this is a good idea, the windy debate, that is, is one of those questions which, will be heatedly debated itself in the week between this film opens and closes.

There are three interconnected stories: In Afghanistan, Privates
Ernest Rodriguez(Michael Pena) and Arian Finch(Derek Luke) are part of a new strategy to win the war; In an unnamed California University, Dr. Stephen Malley(Robert Redford) and his student Todd(Andrew Garfield) have a talk about the latter's future; and in Washington, DC, crack reporter Janine Roth(Meryl Streep) is given an audience with Sen. Jasper Irving(Tom Cruise), to whom he announces the strategy which Finch and Rodriguez are a part.
 
The acting is excellent. Garfield manages to go toe-to-toe with Redford, and Pena and Luke do action, and in a flashback, a college presentation rather well. Saying Cruise and Streep are brilliant is redundant. However, except for the two soldiers falling out of a helicopter near the beginning of the film to set up the suspenseful battle scenes, what we have are just people talking. This isn't really a movie, but a couple of dramatized speeches. Talk Talk Talk. It's said that the film is Anti-American, it is, but not in the way one would think. Redford and Carnahan basically bemoan the decline of America, something people have been doing since the 18th century.

We don't really need debates on strategy or people advocating a program of enforced National Service, well, on second though we might, but not as something we have to pay ten bucks to watch in a movie theater when we would rather be entertained. This is going to be Cruise's first genuine flop in years. Wow.


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