Tickets for last night’s screening of Lions for Lambs could not be bought for love or money. The world premiere of Robert Redford’s political thriller has been one of the most anticipated events of The Times BFI London Film Festival. His withering satire of the US War on Terror stars Meryl Streep as a high-profile journalist and Tom Cruise as a young Republican hawk. You can’t fault the anger, but the drama glows as brightly as a five-watt bulb.

The script by Matthew Michael Carnahan is a series of animated arguments that look desperately staged. Dialogue veers into towering speeches, the film is effectively a theatre piece. The surprise, and disappointment, is how little effort Redford makes to mould the three central debates into a credible drama. He himself plays a university professor and idealist. He is a 21st-century Miss Jean Brodie who subtly spins the idea that fighting a war is profoundly more rewarding than talking about it, and his deadpan conviction is genuinely spooky.

The dirty politics of America’s military policy in the Middle East are thrashed out between Streep’s cynical journalist and Cruise’s presidential hopeful. The reality of Cruise’s mad campaign is felt by two of Redford’s former students, who are in the army. They are stranded in no man’s land with bullet wounds and no escape routes.

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Not a single character feels real and rounded. The most intriguing conflict of egos is the fight between Cruise and Streep. They grapple with each other’s arguments like professional television wrestlers. She is full of disbelieving small smiles and arched eyebrows; he is a desk-thumping, ultra-smooth flirt who beams at her with total insincerity.

The earnestness of Redford’s film is admirable. The complex point the film tries to make – about the way that the idealism, politics and grim reality of war interact - is the stuff of every great festival challenge. This is not designed to be an easy watch, but there’s a fatal lack of flesh and blood. The film has an almost autistic lack of personality. Redford’s clever attempt to fill these gaping holes by casting actors whom audiences will instantly recognise and can flesh out doesn’t pay off.

There’s almost a ghostly echo of his own memorable performance as a beleaguered journalist in All the President’s Men. Where that film was based on truth, Lions for Lambs sits on acres of speculation.

Trying to harpoon Republican conspiracies about oil and the fabled “Axis of Evil” is a blood sport in Washington. Cruise calmly boots this inquisition into touch. “Do you want to win the War on Terror? Yes or no? That is the quintessential question of our time,” he snaps in one of the film’s rare charged moments. It is this rhetorical question about fear that haunts the entire film. If the characters themselves were less rhetorical it might even sting.

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