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Hard-nosed TV journalist Streep |
Clunky history lesson from Redford
LIONS FOR LAMBS
Directed by Robert Redford
Certificate 15
I have to admit to a sneaking suspicion that Robert Redford must have called in a few favours to establish his starry leads for this pulpit-pounding sermon against the American military foray into Afghanistan.
The likes of Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, along with
Redford himself on the screen, are sure to draw in the customers.
But what will they find waiting for them?
We open with Meryl Streep as a hard-nosed TV journalist striding briskly into the plush Washington offices of smoothie senator and presidential hopeful Tom Cruise, showing his famous teeth for an hour-long interview billed as a “world scoop”.
Cruise wants her to help ease him into the White House, and the bait he dangles is to reveal a dramatic “new strategy” from the US military to finish off the Taliban once and for all.
She gets the story. He gets the kudos.
“Small is how we fight now. Small is good,” he declares (no ribald laughter, please).
And what is this strategy? Simply the unleashing of elite Special Forces units to hound the Taliban gooks from their strongholds, as we cut to a whirring helicopter full of Uncle Sam’s finest as they soar over a forbidding mountain range at night to take a vital peak and catch the enemy off guard.
But it all goes disastrously wrong. And here Redford is at his best, with genuinely frighteningly sequences of the chopper running into a hail of rocket fires and two of the soldiers tumbling out of the back to land in deep snow, severely injured but miraculously alive and at the mercy of the Taliban forces creeping towards them over the dark wintry terrain.
The film intercuts with shots of the US commander exhorting his troops (“We’re gonna put our foot on their throats!”) to the harsh reality of a hopeless mission while, safe back in Washington, the senator is trying to convince his suspicious mouthpiece that all is going swimmingly.
The third strand is Redford himself as a university professor in his office talking global morality with a bright young student (Andrew Garfield), unaware that two of his former pupils are in fact the soldiers (Derek Luke, Michael Pena) stranded on the mountain 9,000 miles away.
The whole piece comes over as a hubristic talkathon, full of impassioned speeches which fall like lead balloons in a turgid history lesson we’ve all heard before.
As for Redford, Hollywood’s golden boy has aged almost beyond recognition. Even the crinkles in that once-handsome face have crinkles, like a waxwork mask that will shake all his devoted fans.
It certainly shook me. But that’s anno domini, isn’t it? |
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