I had the pleasure of receiving a pass to see a screening of "Lambs for Lions" before it hit theaters, and I ultimately decided that this movie was worth analyzing:

This movie has three running storylines: the first one...
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I had the pleasure of receiving a pass to see a screening of "Lambs for Lions" before it hit theaters, and I ultimately decided that this movie was worth analyzing:

This movie has three running storylines: the first one involves a veteran journalist (Meryl Streep) landing a one-hour interview with Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise), a Republican Senator from Illinois whose war-mongering has all the conviction of a used-car salesman. The second storyline is about Professor Stephen Malley (Robert Redford), a poli-sci professor at an unknown California university, and a privileged but gifted student (newcomer Andrew Garfield). Connecting the two plots is the story of buddies Ernest and Arian (Michael Pena, Derek Luke), two former Malloy students serving in Afghanistan.

The movie's message is that war is futile and the importance of acknowledging sacrifice, but the overall effort feels muddled and uninvolving. Cruise's character is ambitious but smarmy, but it's obvious early on that even he's completely oblivious to what the war's really about; he's not the villain, but rather a dutiful henchman for something much bigger. Redford's breakthough with frat boy Garfield tries to circumvent nearly every teacher-student cliche you find but only partically succeeds in bringing something insightful to the table. The action in Afghanistan, on the other hand, is probably the weak spot of the movie; it's underdeveloped, one-dimensional and embraces everything you'd come to expect from watching two soldiers fight for their lives in unbearable circumstances.

A fourth parable is established in the last half-hour of the film, one that explores how American society seems to obsess with pointless celebrity news and avoid the "ugly," relevant information that really matters. Oddly enough, the best performance in the film wasn't from either of the three headliners but rather Kevin Dunn, who plays Streep's boss at a cable news outlet. What he had to say about "the system" and the double-standard presented by today's media spoke volumes.

In the end, what works in this movie cancels out its flaws, but overall the film never excels at anything. At best, it's a powerful movie with a meaningful agenda, but at worst it's an uninvolving civics lesson with explosions. Questions are asked, some of them thought-provoking, but there's no answers and very little new to say. The ending is somewhat ambiguous, but I don't think anything else would've suited the story.