It veers dangerously between being a heady Political Science lesson and an expose of how US war policies work. Lions for Lambs is very ambitious — it expects the audience to weigh every word being uttered in a dialogue-a-second script and wants emotions to run free. Let’s just say it’s an elder’s point of view — a father-figure’s grief put into words. Too many words.

The story is hard to grasp till the end. The narrative shifts between four sets of people. Professor Stephen Malley (Redford) teaches Political Science at a university and is trying to get a gifted student to attend classes and care about the state of the nation. Janine Roth (Streep) is a veteran journalist who is trying to keep the human side of news alive. She interviews Senator Jasper Irving (Cruise), a smooth-talking politician using the war in Afghanistan to leverage his entry into the White House. Irving launches a new military move in Afghanistan that involves a platoon of soldiers taking seige of the rocky highgrounds.

Two soldiers, ex-students of Malley, are sent on this mission, but poor information lands them right in the middle of the enemy. Using them as examples, Malley tries to explain to his new student that the country needs youngsters to see through the politicians’ false promises and bring about change. Simultaneously, Janine picks out the loopholes in Senator Irving’s hollow plans, justifying Malley’s statements. Too hard to digest.

The script by Matthew Michael Carnahan is painfully wordy — it seems like he has tried to fit a whole year’s Political Science and Peace Studies syllabi into a 90-minute movie. He peppers it with enough exclamations to make it sound contemporary, but it gets very heavy on the head after the first hour. Even through the action, words are not minced.

Redford, Streep and Cruise do a class act in their respective roles, but Streep clearly stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Her depiction of a journalist desperate to get back to the tradition of hard-hitting news is well graced by her gestures and intonation. Redford makes his character sound whiny and preachy, and Cruise could have done better. At first, he makes his character — an oily business-minded politician — look perfect, but after the first ten minutes, he repeats his performance in A Few Good Men. Camerawork by Phillippe Rousselot doesn’t help either. Wide angle shots do little to up the intensity of the scenes.

Without this trio, Lions for Lambs wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. The title itself means that US leaders (the lambs) don’t have a spine and it’s the soldiers (the lions) who make the country great. Like we didn’t already know that!