OVERCOOKED LAMB Cruise, Streep, Redford (Photo: Getty Images)
It looks like Tom Cruise's stint as the head of United Artists is off to a brutal start. Lions For Lambs, his new prestige film about students who join fighting in Afghanistan—directed by and co-starring Robert Redford—opens Friday, and early indications are it's going to be the biggest disaster in the careers of anyone involved.

The New York Post wrote last week about how the film's numbers are tracking low, and the initial reviews are scathing. Making matters worse for Cruise, the liberal politics of the film also reportedly doomed his movie/theme-park endeavor with Washington Redskins owner (and big-time Bush backer) Daniel Snyder.

If the reactions of advance-screening audiences are any indication, this movie is Redford's own personal Gigli (and Cruise's Battlefield Earth).

Cruise plays a morally ambiguous neocon senator, so Redford puts him in a three-piece suit to suggest he might be shifty. (Does anybody but villains wear vests in movies anymore?) Similarly, Redford's character, a college professor, wears turtle shell glasses, letting you know he is a thoughtful man, capable of great insight. In one particularly cringe-inspiring moment, Redford's character rails against the Bush Administration as "starched collars," and in the process incites widespread audience groans. (Take that Cheney!) Clocking it at 80 minutes, it also bears all the classic signs of a movie chopped in post-production—jarring jump-cuts, continuity errors (especially with the way Redford's character parts his hair), and the like.

Even the movie's anti-war base seems wary: At a showing Monday night on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the granola-coated student audience (a good 30 percent of whom had some sort of anti-war flair or some sort of hemp product on their person) began booing and derisively cheering as the end credits rolled. On the way out of the theater, one peacenik summed up audience sentiment succinctly when she turned to her boyfriend and said, "That movie was so bad, I want to punch you in the fucking face."