“Do you want to win the War on Terror?” asks snake oil Senator Jasper Irving. “Yes or no? This is the quintessential yes or no question of our time.”
‘Yes!’ say stand-up students Ernest and Arian. One’s black, one’s Hispanic, and together they’re ready to kick ass, take names, work hard and change the world.
‘No!’ says golden-tanned frat boy Todd. It’s all a lie! Fuck the system! He’s got bongs to hit and girls to bang, what’s the point of getting involved in all this political shit?
‘What does that even mean?!’ ask the rest of us, as Lions For Lambs unfolds into a relentlessly hand-wringing talk-fest in which liberal guilt and voter apathy collide head on with those devious, lying neo-con liars and their cheating, lie-filled war.
While the black and Hispanic communities are the first to volunteer, on the lofty heights of Capitol Hill, Senator Irving (Tom Cruise) dances a verbal tango with Janine Roth (Meryl Streep), a sceptical old-school hack, promising her from behind his giant mahogany desk that everything is set to change. But why, when attacked by Afghanistan, did America go to war in Iraq? “When will you journalists stop asking that question?” demands Irving. “When we get an answer,” replies Roth.
But for all its balshiness, Lions For Lambs feels half-hearted. There’s a rather unpleasant waft of self-satisfaction that drifts tangibly through the film. Like every American movie that purports to offer The Truth about the Middle East, certain targets are resolutely off limits. The American soldiers, here represented by the saccharine selflessness of Michael Peña and Derek Luke, are brave and innocent, doing the dirty work that the rest of us don’t like to think about. But like it or not, these are the same soldiers responsible for the photos from Abu Ghraib, the same soldiers who tortured and sexually abused Iraqi civilians and urinated on detainees.
Lions For Lambs is on the right side – it’ll send Fox News pundits into a spasm of patriotic rage – but it’s too polished, too tactless, too… small to adequately address the big questions of our time.
