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Three stories involving politics and American military in the Middle East are intercut: a reporter (Meryl Streep) working on a “detailed timeline of the war on terror” interviews a Senator (Tom Cruise) backing a “new plan in Afghanistan”; a professor (Robert Redford) at an unnamed California university tries to motivate a smart slacker (Andrew Garfield); two of the professor’s former students (Derek Luke, Michael Peña) are intimately involved in executing the Senator’s plan.

Big questions: Can this relatively short film (it runs 88 minutes) make a big impact? And is America ready to see Cruise out of the tabloids and back on film?

Skip it: Ultimately little more than a call for Americans to be more engaged in current events, the well-intentioned film plays like a dramatization of the world’s most obvious Op-Ed piece. There’s nothing fresh or smart here, which might work if the message were packaged in a mass-audience friendly thriller, but the dumbed-down talking heads approach doesn’t provide enough stimulation for either the action or the intellectual crowd.

Catch it: Yes, Cruise is still a good actor. The scenes he shares with Streep are the film’s best. But considering how embarrassingly limp the other storylines are, it’s not much of a compliment.

Bottom line: “Lions for Lambs” feels like the work of an over-eager first-time filmmaker. Not the seventh film of an Oscar-winning veteran. It’s almost impossible to conceive of the movie reaching an audience that needs it most, while everyone else would be better renting this year’s exceptional Iraq war documentary “No End in Sight.”

Bonus: Perhaps this line of dialogue sums up the movie’s intentions: “Better to have tried and failed. At least you did something.”

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