Posts Tagged ‘Robert Redford’

Lions For Lambs reviewed

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

Have you ever sat and watched two people argue? You know, one of those really ignorant arguments where neither side is listening to what the other says? I’m talking about those really heated arguments, where a lot of things get said in really creative ways with a lot of beautifully poetic language but it’s all wasted on someone else who’s just doing the same thing.

Sure, when you’re in the argument, you’re totally in favor of taking up sides and fighting to the teeth for what you believe in… but if you’re not a part of that argument — if you’re just a spectator — it gets really boring, really quickly.

That’s how I felt about Lions For Lambs. I watched for 88 minutes as two sides of an argument were bantered back and forth, dishing out the same rhetoric I can get on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Hell, next year is election year, I can get this same script on every channel while Hillary and Rudy drone on and on with each other, talking all night but never saying anything.

There wasn’t even a plot. It’s just a pair of contrived situations designed to facilitate the argument, spliced together, with occasional war footage mixed in just to give the audience some token violence for buying their tickets.

Adding to this heaping helping of steaming film excrement is the low quality directing and producing work. A major portion of the movie centers around dialog between Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, but it’s obvious that the two were never in the same room together during the making of the movie! Both are acting to the camera, and they’re never in the same shot together except for a few short seconds.

Also, speaking of cheap film editing, every helicopter scene is so blatantly computer generated that I, as one of the 9 audience members in attendance at this suck-fest, was offended at the film maker’s low standards. But why should I be surprised? The film maker in question is also the third star of the film: Robert Redford. I can’t help thinking that the making of a movie was only a formality, nothing more than a tedious detail in getting toward his real goal of putting his face on a big screen and whining about politics to people who payed $10 in hopes of being entertained.

Don’t waste your money.