The Men Who Stare at Goats Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

Very funny trailer

This is one of those trailers where you hope they did not put all the good bits in it and the rest of the film is not as good.

Looks very funny, and good to see Kevin Spacey back in a big film. I shall be seeing this one and hoping the masses can get past the title.

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[Highly rated reviewer]

The Silence of the Goats

A journalist down on his luck runs away to war, to prove himself a man. He is out of his depth until he accidentally falls in with an ex-army pyschic, and if he thought he was out of his depth before, he's now thrown in the deep end.

TMWSAG is a good old-fashioned romp with a strain of Serious running through it. You could be forgiven for thinking this is a Coen Brothers film, and in their hands I think this could have been a knock out comedy.

As it stands, the comedy is strong for the first hour - George Clooney has truly perfected his quirky side - but drops off for the last third of the movie as War comes off the back seat to take a more prominent role. (Saying that, the audience I watched this with thought it was hilarious when the two main characters get blown up by an IED...)

Kevin Spacey is fantastic as the evil nemesis, Jeff Bridges is basically The Dude (no bad thing), Ewan McGregor is okay (but the Jedi in-joke is pushed one (or five) too many times.) And, like a Coen Brothers film, the supporting cast is note-perfect.

The Men Who Stare At Goats is a solid film, fun, funny, but the plot is slight, and it's scarily believable that the US army would be exploring this unbelievable new-age crap!

To paraphrase Brigadier General Dean Hopgood: 'The Russians read a made-up story that we were looking into psychic powers. We told them that it was made up, but they thought we were making that up, so they went ahead and started investigating psychic powers. We weren't looking into psychic powers, but now that the Russians are, we can't let them make advacements in this area, and so we have to look into psychic powers...'