What should have been a nice emulation of off-Broadway (or off-Loop) rhetoric instead becomes a not-so-inspired lecture, a photocopy of a photocopy of the printout of a welter of political blog entries. “Lions for Lambs,” from a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan (“The Kingdom”) attempts, through several parallel stories, to capture the issues underlying the emotions brought out by American wars in the Middle East, yet this first project from the United Artists run by Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner is, for the most part, comically inert, with Robert Redford’s slack direction of the acting complemented by drab cinematography and puzzling pacing. It’s a weapon of mass distraction. The thoughts are there, but the arguments remain rhetoric, a dossier of concerns and not drama. One of the grandest implausibility is having an establishment journalist (Meryl Streep) who challenges a hotshot young reactionary senator (Tom Cruise, who nails the callow creature), something that would never, ever happen in contemporary collusion between mass media and politicians. (You can bet that the New York Times’ Judith Miller was more friend than foe to now-convicted felon Irving Libby at every turn.) Streep’s tics are precise yet are lost in the torpor. Redford is also a snooze as an aging college professor disappointed in the ideals of youth. 88m. (Ray Pride)
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