Lions for Lambs (15)
Star rating: ***
Dir: Robert Redford
With: Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise

Watch the trailer here

The Lions For Lambs publicity posters have Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise gazing out like Supreme Court judges. It's an arresting image, with Redford, who directs as well as acts, looking especially ruminative. Having pronounced on one Republican administration in All the President's Men he's back to do the same with Dubya over his prosecution of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This time he's acting more in sorrow than in anger, more's the pity. A less restrained Redford might have avoided a film that comes in like a lamb and goes out the same way.

The subject matter and big names involved mean Lions is being talked up as Oscar material. I know, feel free to yawn. But given 2008 is a presidential election year, there might be something to the speculation this time. Hollywood couldn't ask for a better chance to boost the Democrat cause (the fact that likely candidate Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq war is a mere detail to slick movie types). More importantly, the industry has nothing to lose from kicking Bush when he's on the way out, and a lot to regain in kudos.

Yet giving an Oscar to Redford's movie would be gesture politics, pure and simple. This is a worthwhile film, not a great one. While it lands some punches, it's sentimental, gabby, and not nearly angry or insightful enough. If you want to see three of acting's big beasts roar, Lions is worth the ticket price; if you want the definitive picture on the post-9/11 world, keep looking.

The script by Matthew Michael Carnahan (who also wrote the Saudi terrorist drama The Kingdom) takes three stories and attempts to connect them over a few hours. Viewers of TV's 24 will be familiar with the adrenalised, multi-layered style. In Washington DC, Meryl Streep's television reporter has been summoned to see Tom Cruise's Republican senator about a troop surge in Afghanistan. On the west coast, Robert Redford, playing a politics professor, is taking a student to task for slacking off. Meanwhile, two US soldiers, former students of Redford's, have run into trouble in Afghanistan.

The fate of Rodriguez and Finch (Michael Pena and Derek Luke) sits at the film's heart as Redford cuts between the jaw-jaw of the civilians and the war-war happening on the ground. Separated from their platoon, the young soldiers are deep in enemy territory, wounded and afraid. At mission command, courtesy of night- vision technology, the commanders can see the pair, reduced to little green blobs, as they lie on a mountaintop with the Taliban advancing towards them. It's like a grisly video game, only this one is being played for real.

When attention returns to the talking heads in DC and California the film flags badly. There are compensations, particularly in the verbal tussle between Streep and Cruise. This is the second "war-on- terror" film Streep has starred in lately. In Rendition she played a CIA chief given to whipping off her glasses at tense moments. She does the same here, albeit with a different pair (someone's clearly been to Specsavers). When it comes to politicians like Cruise, her veteran correspondent has 20:20 vision. After sitting politely through a long spiel about how the US forces have to go in hard before the building of schools and hospitals can start, she asks crisply: "So, it's basically killing people to help people?"

Cruise's senator is a caricature, though a good-value one. At the movie's London Film Festival premiere there were gales of laughter as the camera fell on mocked-up pictures of him with Bush, Condi, Rummy and Cheney. His bustling little politico knows how to hit Streep where it hurts, though. The media is a windsock, he tells her, twisting to suit the prevailing political weather. Far from being neutral observers, television reporters, in particular, couldn't get enough of the war at the start. It's a charge that will, or should, score a direct hit with some in the news business.

This exchange is one of a few instances when we can feel the heat of Redford's anger. When the man himself appears in front of camera his character is so achingly worthy he throws a big wet blanket over proceedings. No wonder his student was cutting classes. Redford is more affecting in a flashback scene with Rodriguez and Finch. Talking about their plans to enlist, he tells them of "a German general" who said of British troops during the First World War: "Nowhere else have I seen such lions led by such lambs." Odd the screenplay should opt for this over the more familiar line, "lions led by donkeys". Perhaps that was deemed too insulting to serving US commanders.

Lions For Lambs has important points to make; it's just a pity they are so obvious. Nothing is aired here that hasn't already been said in print, television, or in your own front room. To their credit, Redford and Carnahan try to move the story on by focussing on Iran and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan (Iraq is written off as a lost cause), but there's not a lot of fresh thinking here, either.

Redford hasn't done prodding our conscience just yet, though. Wrapping up the tale, he opts for an ending that may strike some as mawkish. To me, it was one of the film's better calls and a brave one; in a movie about taking sides, Redford leaves no doubt where his sympathies lie. The Sundance Kid - still crazy about his principles after all these years.