A movie I really wanted to like more than I wound up liking. Susan Sarandon plays a former member of The Weather Underground who’s been in hiding for decades, but gives herself up. When she does, an ambitious journalist (Shia Lebouf) puts a lot of her old friends at risk by digging into their backgrounds. Robert Redford gets accidentally outed as a fellow exile living under a fake identity and has to go on the run.
What Works: Shia is crisp and alert. Redford also shows no intentions of sleep-walking, and the movie is sporadically interesting…
What Doesn’t Work:…Just not interesting enough. It’s a little too long, a little too restrained (where was some of that 60’s hellfire when you needed it? Redford looks like the kind of guy who’d rather be at IKEA than planning a revolution), and a little too so-so. A decent time, but not a very good one.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Vietnam blah blah, Nixon blah blah, the 60’s were great but confusing blah blah. Redford’s Lions for Lambs is a much better diatribe because it tried to stay relevant to what’s actually relevant.