Lions for Lambs: Critic Reviews

The tiny scale and armchair talkiness mark the movie as a bit of a folly, an act of idealistic hubris in today's commercial marketplace, yet that's its (minor) fascination too.

Career Politicians, the Fourth Estate and Disaffected Youth all earn a stern knuckle rapping in Lions for Lambs.

Pure fence-sitting liberal agony is all that's on offer here, in a muddled and pompous film about America's war on terror.

Though these dialogues are worthy, the medium doesn't seem right for the message.

For all its passion and topical currency, the movie plays too often like a college colloquium.

It does not feel good to report that a movie with Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise makes the eyelids droop. But that's what Lions for Lambs does.

Unfortunately, a single, compelling plot would have been far more effective than earnest lectures in triplicate.

A shallow tar pit cluttered with skeletal ideas.

Lions for Lambs marks Robert Redford's seventh film as director...and it's certainly not his best. But I'll say this for it: It's his bravest.

Lions for Lambs is a civics lesson, necessary to be sure, but leaving us drained of resolve, wading in the morass it hoped to pull us out of.

The new antiwar pictures are all clunks and wind, but they're full of fervent acting and affectingly rough -- they lack the usual studio overpolish. Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs is the clunkiest, windiest, and roughest of the lot.

Redford is surely smart enough to realize, as the professor turns his ire on those who merely chatter while Rome burns, that his movie is itself no better, or more morally effective, than high-concept Hollywood fiddling.

The movie is a talkathon with a certain amount of military action. It could be presented about as well as a radio play.

Redford confounds expectations, not politically but dramatically.

...a passionate but mannered rhetorical exercise.

...Lions for Lambs is also stagy, and worse, dull.

It's commendable that the filmmakers didn't make a strident screed, but did they have to settle for a waffling yak-fest?

It's missing the movie part of being a movie. And so it sort of just sits there talking.

Robert Redford (who also directed), Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep might just as well have appeared on-screen for a couple of minutes with signs that said, 'War is bad,' and been done with it. Saves everyone the cost of a ticket.

Plays out as a mountain of self-righteously guilt-ridden rhetoric perched on a molehill of narrative.

Lambs is utterly lacking in any kind of recognizable cinematic arc, convincing logic, coherent narrative or persuasive political viewpoint.

Robert Redford's first helming chore in seven years, and his most directly political pic yet, amounts to a giant cry of "Americans, get engaged!" wrapped in a star-heavy discourse that uses a lot of words to say nothing new.

A talkathon that is going to rival the Tampa Bay Devil Rays' season ender for its ability to produce empty seats.

This sometimes heavy-handed sermon about political apathy among the young, the stakes of media collusion with government, and the fog of war is almost certain to scare off the people it is intended to reach.

There is much talk of paralysis in Robert Redford's what's-wrong-with-America movie Lions for Lambs, and there is a whole lot of the same in the movie itself.