"The Men Who Stare at Goats" Film Review
Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 01:01PM “The Men Who Stare at Goats” Film Review
By Marty Meltz
“The Men Who Stare at Goats” (my 0-10 quality rating: 6) Genre: Comedy Director: Grant Heslov Screenplay: Peter Straughan, based on the 2004 Jon Ronson nonfiction bestseller Cast: George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey Time: 1 hr., 33 min. Rating: R (vulgarity, some drug content, brief nudity)
OK, yeah,… I can see the creative poker-faced comedy it’s shooting for, but it most definitely does not have the plot energy or momentum to sustain itself. It’s a bore.
“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is all George Clooney, who does a marvelous comedic effort with a film that courts yawns all over the place. Aggravated by the continuing Ewan McGregor narration throughout, the humor comes off heavy and unfocused. The true story upon which the film is based surely had its potential for lampoon of the military, being about the real life history of military mind control, and the Jon Ronson nonfiction book sure made it a lot creepier. In that, the U.S. government had its lab technicians spike some unwitting agents with LSD. In the book, this experiment resulted in its leader committing suicide.
This current attempt at satirizing the story sure had fertile material there but it has its problems setting up the necessary comedy undertone that fuels a well-driven laughfest. Clooney’s good, his track record for deadpan well established, but the constant subtle ironies so necessary for this kind of sophisticated high-level wit are there only sporadically. The culprit, actually, is the weight and breadth of the story itself; it distractingly weighs the wannabe comedy off-balance. I wait and wait and wait for a sustained laughs interval, all in vain.
Seems a reporter stranded in Kuwait, Bob Wilson (Ewan McGregor), looking for a big story, happens upon a quirky trash-can salesman who claims to be a Special Forces operator who’s on a mission too far out to even imagine. The man is Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). He says he’s part of an experimental U.S. military unit. This organization, he explains, is on its way to actually changing the ways in which war is accomplished. The unit is a legion of “Warrior Monks” a.k.a. Jedi Warriors, who have actual psychic powers. They can read the enemy’s thoughts, pass through solid walls, and, yes, kill a goat simply by staring at it.
Now, the program’s founder, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), is missing and Cassady is assigned a mission to find him. Wilson, taken in by Cassady’s wild and woolly tales, decides to go along with him in quest of a major story. Soon enough, their clues lead to Django who’s at a secret training camp run by rogue psychic Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey). Wilson now finds himself in the midst of a grudge contest between Django’s New Earth Army and Hooper’s super soldiers militia. Wilson is going to be in a position where he’ll have to deal with an absolutely impossible client.
The comedy, when it works, turns mostly on the government’s efforts at a new kind of warfare based upon paranormal abilities.
This natural material for comedy should have been right down George Clooney’s alley, but the film doesn’t supply him with that alley.
Marty Meltz, http://www.martymoviereviews.com, was the 30-year film critic for the Award-winning, statewide Maine Sunday Telegram until 12/31/07 when his column was budget-cut. He continues on his website.
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