Honolulu Weekly

The Men Who Stare at Goats / The inherent thing wrong with The Men Who Stare at Goats is the tag that opens the film. “More of this is true than you would believe.” The source from which it was adapted, the book with the same name by London’s Guardian columnist Jon Ronson, opens with “This is a true story.” As wry as the book’s tone is, the author would like you to actually believe his story. Director Grant Heslov (who also wrote the far superior Good Night, and Good Luck) treats the material as a complete joke, utterly diffusing any chance of even conspiracy paranoia in his concept, making the proceedings a pointless waste of time. Granted, a movie about the US Army funding a unit called Project Jedi to create psychic spies, or “super soldiers,” is hard to swallow with a serious face, but most of the jokes aren’t rip-roaring enough here. The material would actually have been better served as a straight-up drama laced with dry moments of humor.

Ewan McGregor plays an Ann Arbor reporter who goes to Iraq, not only to find a career-making story, but also to impress his ex-wife who left him for his editor. He randomly stumbles upon Lyn Cassady, a name dropped from a story he had previously worked on while still in the states. The subject of that story claimed to be a psychic spy trained by the military and named Cassady as the most powerful member of their team. Smelling a story, he follows Cassady throughout the Middle East, accompanying him on his mission that may or may not be in an official government capacity.

The performances are great even though they serve an empty story. George Clooney does a fine enough job as the super soldier Cassady, but he’s played this type of character way better in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Most fun is Jeff Bridges doing a riff on the Dude from The Big Lebowski as the hippie leader of “the New Earth Army.” Kevin Spacey as a bitter, conniving member of the unit also has a few moments of comic fun, especially during a test to “see” an item in a closed drawer that has him attempting to “channel” an entity with an unexpected nasal whine.

Still, it’s almost as if Heslov decided to film an unfinished draft of a screenplay– it’s all a wacky series of cobbled together sketches and flashbacks. And for something to be satire, that which it is mocking must be recognizable in the very real ideals it seeks to pointedly poke fun at. At the very least, the subject of derision needs to have some sort of point of view. The Men Who Stare at Goats doesn’t know what it wants its goofiness to say; it should never have been structured as a comedy. The resulting film just isn’t funny. It’s aimless and desperate.