Too Cruise-controlled

"Lions for Lambs" is a rallying cry against cynicism, indifference, disengagement and complacency.

The kind of complacency that could lead to catastrophe, like . . . Tom Cruise being elected to the U.S. Senate.

At least that's the catastrophe presented to us in "Lambs," which features Cruise as a lupine conservative trying to dupe a reporter (Meryl Streep) into selling some dubious new phase of the war on terror to the public.

Cruise is unconvincing as Sen. Irving, and I suspect that's almost what director Robert Redford had in mind.

Surely Redford cast Cruise because he wanted some of the actor's grinning, "Top Gun" razzle-dazzle - attributes that make him a suitable salesman for the foreign-policy snake oil the senator is trying to pitch.

But one of the things that Cruise fails to sell us on in "Lions for Lambs" is himself. When the camera pans to tricked-up images of Cruise shaking hands with Bush and Cheney, the audience titters. The movie might have had better luck if Cruise had wowed Streep by sliding across a varnished floor in his underwear.

Is it all Cruise's fault? Hardly. The vignette with Streep's character ends with a curious argument between the reporter and her boss, who wants to run the story. Well, of course he does. A new military offensive is a story, whether it's going to work or not. You can toss in as many countervailing POVs as you want, but it's news.

"Lions For Lambs," in the person of Streep's character, imagines that you must swallow a story whole in order to report it. The dialogue between Streep and Cruise is slick and musical, and the actors find the rhythm of it, but it doesn't convince as the kind of power-brokering that goes on in big-time politics and media.

The movie's unusual structure skips among three of these two-character vignettes. Another focuses on two soldiers (Michael Pena, Derek Luke) stranded on an Afghan mountaintop, likely to be the first victims of the senator's risky new plan.

They are the idealistic former students of a professor, played by Robert Redford, who in a third segment tries to persuade a talented but indifferent pupil (Andrew Garfield) to drop his posture of cynicism.

This slice of "Lions for Lambs" actually works fairly well - there's good back-and-forth chemistry between professor and student, who claims to have made up his mind that our corrupted world is not worth engaging, except to negotiate the fattest paycheck possible.

To paraphrase Dumas, he sounds like a young man trying to convince himself of something. The professor counters that if things are that bad, the lad, because he's gifted, has a special obligation to change them.

As they used to say on campus, right on. *

Produced by Robert Redford, Matthew Michael Carnahan, Andrew Hauptman and Tracy Falco, directed by Robert Redford, written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, music by Mark Isham, distributed by United Artists.