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LIONS FOR LAMBS Say this for Hollywood: At least it's trying to inject some semblance of sane debate into the Iraq War debacle. While the right-wing continues to think nothing about American soldiers being sent to Iraq to "get their heads blown off for the president's amusement" (as Rep. Pete Stark accurately stated a few weeks ago before cowardly issuing an apology), filmmakers from the more sentient left are trying to wake the populace up to the evils of this insidious administration and add value to every life lost in this rich man's war. But do their recruitment tools have to be so ineffectual? On the heels of Rendition comes Lions For Lambs, another drama whose noble aspirations are bungled by hamfisted storytelling. Working from a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan, director Robert Redford uses three concurrent tales to stir debate about what's happening around us. The best finds a reporter (Meryl Streep) interviewing a Republican senator (Tom Cruise) on his strategy for winning the war on terror. In the second plot thread, which functions as little more than connective tissue between the other two tales, two soldiers (Michael Pena and Derek Luke) involved in the senator's master plan find themselves stranded on a snowy mountaintop in Afghanistan with enemy combatants closing in fast. And in the third story arc, college professor Stephen Malley (Redford) urges a self-absorbed student (Andrew Garfield) to get off his complacent behind and take a stand on major issues. This part is too bald-faced and heavy-handed to be effective; Redford would have had more luck personally distributing get-out-the-vote pamphlets at movie theaters nationwide. **
MARTIAN CHILD The credits state that Martian Child stars John Cusack, Amanda Peet and Joan Cusack, but really, it stars Lucky Charms, M&M's and Amazon.com. These are the top winners of the product placement contest – at least E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial employed Reese's Pieces in an innovative manner that benefited its storyline. But Martian Child is no E.T., despite a plot that involves a being from another planet who just wants to go home. Or is Dennis (Bobby Coleman) merely an ordinary boy who only thinks he's from another planet? Only God (or L. Ron Hubbard) knows for sure. At any rate, this is most like K-Pax, the atrocious 2001 release with Kevin Spacey as a mental patient who claims he's from outer space. This isn't nearly as noxious as that Chinese-water-torture of a movie, but that's largely because few things are as frightening as watching Spacey attempt to be cuddly. Coleman's Dennis eventually finds himself adopted by David Gordon (Cusack), a widower who senses he and the boy might make a good match. Director Menno Meyjes ladles on the glop in this wannabe tearjerker, but the movie fails to connect precisely because Dennis never appears to be a real boy, human or otherwise: He's merely a writer's high-concept execution, a series of quirky traits that have coagulated to take on human form. Cusack is likable as always, and he's especially engaging in his scenes opposite Amanda Peet (as his late wife's best friend); viewers may find themselves wishing the pair had more scenes together. Of course, when the best parts of a movie called Martian Child are those that don't involve the Martian child, then something's definitely askew. **
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN The Coen Brothers have always been known for genre-hopping, and their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel smacks of both a contemporary Western and a crime thriller. But may I add the classification of monster movie to the mix? As I watched Javier Bardem's seemingly unstoppable Anton Chigurh shuffle his way through the picture, killing left and right without remorse, I realized that it's been a long time since I've seen such an unsettling creature on the screen. No Country for Old Men is a delirious drama that often echoes such classics as Psycho, Touch of Evil and Chinatown, not only in its intricate and unpredictable plot structure but also in its look at an immoral world in which chance and fate battle for the upper hand and in which evil is as tangible a presence as sticks and stones. Chigurh spends the film, set in 1980 Texas, on the trail of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a cowboy who stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong and walks away with $2 million in cash. The cat-and-mouse chase between Chigurh and Moss is enough to propel any standard narrative, yet tossed into the mix is Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a weary sheriff who, baffled and deflated by the wickedness that has come to define his country, nevertheless trudges from crime scene to crime scene, hoping to save Moss and stop Chigurh. This isn't the first great movie certain to have its ending criticized even by many who enjoyed the rest of the picture (Apocalypse Now also springs to mind), yet love it or hate it, accept it or debate it, it's perhaps the only proper conclusion for a movie as uncompromising as this one. ****
