Imagine if one of Hollywood’s most famous and outspoken liberals got a couple of his big-star buddies together and made a movie about the Iraq war. Imagine if it was an earnest movie, not an obnoxious one, that tried its hardest not to be overly aggressive, but that stubbornly refused to do anything except promote its own political convictions — including provide even a shred of entertainment. Hold that thought.

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Now imagine, on the other hand, a class of college sophomores in a playwriting class at a mid-level liberal arts college, one of those small, well-appointed institutions that turns out class after class of reasonably well-read world-changers, with six-figure debt, and iPods brimming with ultra-hip, obscure bands. And imagine, that after cramming on Brecht and Kushner and Miller, this class of future NGO staffers receives as its first assignment, a one-act play about “a contemporary political issue.”

Got that? Now take those two ideas and merge them, and you’ll have a pretty good approximation of Lions for Lambs. Robert Redford’s talky issue-drama, which also stars Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, is the latest in this fall’s seemingly endless string of Iraq-war movies. We’ve seen The Kingdom, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, and now Lambs and Brian de Palma’s upcoming Redacted, and at this point, even for those of us who proudly accept the label “political junky,” battle fatigue is starting to set in. Washington may be a town that lives to work, where every bar is a chance to debate legislation and every cocktail party is a networking event, but going to the movies shouldn’t be like reading a policy paper (or, in this case, an undergrad’s meager summary of it). Enough is enough. Hear this, Hollywood: You have crossed the line.

Of course, Lions for Lambs is, in its own feeble way, hard to hate. It’s neither glum and sanctimonious in the way of In the Valley of Elah, nor odious in the way of the forthcoming Redacted. The reaction it’s most likely to provoke isn’t outrage, but sympathy. The combined star-wattage of Redford, Cruise, and Streep should be enough to solve the energy crisis, but Lambs is pathetically dim. If this is the best that Hollywood’s gilded liberal royalty can produce, it’s just about enough to make you feel a little bit sorry for them.

Lions for Lambs is stagy and static, about as un-cinematic a movie as you’re likely to see this year. It essentially consists of three separate one-act plays that have been hastily cut together. Each part is made up of a series of bland, sub-Sorkin monologues — and each comes with a tidy message. In one, Redford plays a liberal, California professor lecturing a promising young student (Andrew Garfield) on why he should take civic responsibility seriously. (Message: Get involved!) In another, two Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan (played by Michael Pena and Derek Luke) who used to be Redford’s students are stuck injured on a snowy, darkened hillside, struggling to stay alive until reinforcements come. (Message: War is hell, and it wastes our best and our brightest!) And in the most tedious segment, Meryl Streep plays an aging, left-wing Washington reporter interviewing a young, hotshot Senator (Cruise) about the unveiling of a major new strategy in the war on terror. (Message: The political machine manipulates the public, and the media is complicit!)

The whole thing plays out like a mock-up of a blog exchange, with each side trading generic variants on arguments that any mildly politically engaged American has been privy to for years. As director, Redford does nothing to dress this up. He just lets it play out, as if he’s somehow convinced he’s made something important and compelling.

And the only thing that can be said about Mathew Michael Carnahan’s screenplay is that it’s dreadful. His script treats each player as TV news producer looking for segment guests might — valuing them only for the political positions that they espouse. They’re shallow and un-engaging, talking heads blathering on, like third-rate local newspaper columnists.

The actors don’t bring much to it either. Getting Tom Cruise to play a pro-war Senator ought to have been the movie-casting equivalent of jumping fifty flaming cars on a motorcycle — a wild, outrageous stunt. But it’s not over-the-top enough to provide much in the way of so-bad-it’s-good pleasure, and it should be obvious at this point that subtlety and smarts aren’t this movie’s strong point. Instead, Cruise just grins, and smirks, and squints his eyes — as if Redford instructed him to act like a Senator who thinks he’s Tom Cruise.

As the professor, Redford can’t be bothered to act (perhaps because he was too busy directing the film). He plays a more rumpled, professorial version of himself. His entire performance consists of an old brown corduroy jacket that he wears intermittently to signal that, yes, his character is every bit the frumpy liberal academic you thought he was. Meryl Streep seems the only one to make an attempt, though there’s almost nothing she can do, aside from adding a few pointless tics and a little bit of useless actor’s business to her scenes. During a last-act monologue (which laments, of course, the war advocates who are trying to pull another fast one on America), she actually resorts to nervously readjusting the thermostat. Nothing whatsoever is added to the scene by this desperate fidgeting — but in a movie so devoid of substance, Streep reaches for something—anything — to add to the trite talking points that otherwise dominate the film.

But in the end, that’s really all the film has to offer, and I have difficulty believing that even the most enthusiastic anti-war activist will take much pleasure in the film. After a day spent reading opeds, blog posts, and policy papers, is it too much to ask to go to the movies and find something other than a stale reworking of no-longer-current events? The heavy number of newsy films this season is worrisome, not because they represent liberal Hollywood on the march, but because they show the movie industry resorting to lazy rehashes of what was on Hardball six months before. Steven Colbert famously complained that TV news has become afflicted with “truthiness.” Hollywood, correspondingly, has been overcome by a wave of “messaginess.”

The worst part about it, though, is how shallow and uninformed these films tend to be. At least in the 70s, you could count on political prestige pictures to be smart, engaging pieces of work. But these films reveal an almost embarrassing level of political ineptitude amongst our celebs. They don’t know any more than the rest of us — and in many cases, they seem to know a lot less. Seeing this many flimsy efforts at tackling serious issues is as likely to induce pity as outrage. In the words of one tabloid: Hollywood celebrities — they’re just like us! And for moviegoers this fall, that’s too bad.

—Peter Suderman is associate editor of Doublethink. He blogs at www.theamericanscene.com.