This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 8:58 am and is filed under Drama, L, NEW ON VIDEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Director:
Starring: Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Michael Pena, Andrew Garfield, Derek Luke, Peter Berg
Take your seats everyone. We are ready to begin the lecture. Yes, director Robert Redford is really that obvious with this Matthew Carnahan screenplay. The film features great delivery from a very strong cast, but the characters are only vehicles to deliver the message that the media and the public share the guilt with American leaders(who are said to be beyond hope) for the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everything in this film is only to drive home this message with the all the subtlety of Paris Hilton’s wardrobe. And, just in case the little speeches didn’t hit you over the head, hard enough, some emotional manipulation is thrown in too.
Lions For Lambs revolves around three interconnected stories, which is very trendy these days. The first story has Tom Cruise as a Republican senator with a bold new offensive plan for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Does the US have troops in Afghanistan? I thought other countries were left to handle the fight there. I thought the US was busy fighting for for the freedom of every barrel of oil in Iraq, and rolling armored vehicles through Tehran to assure the rights of large corporations to make obscene profits from US foreign policy. Sorry, I digress. Anyway, Senator Cruise wants to sell his plan to the public and brings in reporter, Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) to receive the exclusive. The offensive is already underway and we see it through the eyes of two soldiers, who left University to join the Armed Forces, and are probably soon wishing they hadn’t. The third story features Robert Redford as a political science professor trying to motivate a gifted student. In doing so, he relates a story about two gifted former students, who left school to join the war. Yes, it is our same two soldiers in Afghanistan. Wow, there was a clever and unexpected tie in!
This current Hollywood infatuation with self-important multi-story screenplays started with Crash (don’t me wrong, though, I liked Crash), and has continued through Babel, Bobby and several others that don’t leap to mind, right now. This one has some fine performances, but the story is tired, the execution is manipulative and the message is late.
