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Movie Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats
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Despite having a gravitas-heavy cast (George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Ewan McGregor, and Jeff Bridges) bizarre source material with infinite potential (the pentagon's top-secret commissioning of psychic warfare), and one of the best trailers of the year, the shockingly unfunny Men Who Stare at Goats is one of 2009's biggest disappointments.
Ewan McGregor plays a frustrated small town journalist who seizes a chance to become a war correspondent at the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003. Upon arriving in Kuwait, he meets a mysterious contractor who turns out to be a longtime psychological ops agent named Lyn Cassady (Clooney) and decides to write a history of the government's super soldier program based on what he learns from him. Neither the film's Clooney and McGregor Ishtar-esque trek across Iraq where they're fired at and abducted by terrorists nor it's flashback look at the origins of the government's "warrior monk" program that began in the 1970s ever feels fully developed.
The weak satire is so lacking in both coherent plot and jokes that don't fall completely flat, that you can understand first-time director Grant Heslov's desperate over reliance on Clooney's comic chops to save the day. Though both his top-of-game deadpan and slapstick abilities are used at every turn to goose up otherwise thin material, it's just not enough to save The Men Who Stare at Goats. Jeff Bridges is also good doing his Lebowski hippie schtick as the leader of the experimental New Earth Army but you keep waiting for something to happen, something for these guys to sink their teeth into. Instead we settle for mildly amusing moments like the one where Bridges' Django character teaches Clooney to lose his inhibitions by awkwardly dancing to some 1980s Billy Idol and Billy Squier songs. You take what you can get with this film, whose sporadically amusing parts never quite add up to a satisfying whole.
The movie's humor is way too broad for it's own good and would have benefitted from a sharper satiric focus, funnier jokes, and an ending that wasn't so out of ideas that it just threw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what might stick, including a really stupid Silence of the Lambs rip off. I wanted to like The Men Who Stare at Goats but, trust me, everything you need to see is in the trailer below.
2 out of 4 stars
Note: A brief scene in the film, where a soldier named Norm opens fire on his own army training base, will probably drop a few jaws in theaters and receive a lot of attention in light of yesterday's sad events at Fort Hood.
The Men Who Stare at Goats trailer
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