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The Men Who Stare at Goats Review
19 Apr 2010
Critics rating: 3 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
The Men Who Stare at Goats

Truth may be stranger than fiction but it doesn't necessarily make for an all-star movie.

“Inspired by…” Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book about the US military’s flirtation with New Age ideas and psychic ops, the movie comes equipped with an all-new shaggy dog yarn about one Bob Wilton, an unhappy smalltown journalist (Ewan McGregor doing his now familiar American drone) who heads off to Iraq to prove himself to his ex-wife.

Cast details

That’s where he tumbles across the biggest story of his life. Persuaded by a doodle in his notebook that this reporter has something special, Lyn Cassady (George Clooney with a Dennis Farina moustache) takes him into his confidence and under his wing.

He’s on a top secret mission, he admits, before backtracking to explain how the Pentagon began to invest in new ways of thinking about soldiering after the Vietnam War, primarily through the fearless experimentation of Lt Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), a hippie officer who envisages “Jedi warriors” bringing peace to the planet with symbolic flower weapons, mind control, and a higher consciousness. Super-powers fit for a superpower.

Proceeding rather cumbersomely on two fronts (rarely a sound military tactic), The Men Who Stare at Goats relates the misadventures of Lyn and Bob in Occupied Iraq, and it chronicles the short history of Django’s First Earth Battalion during the Reagan years, before his dishonourable discharge and the lab goats started keeling over through telepathic suggestion.

If you’re familiar with Ronson’s book or the TV show that accompanied it, then you will know that much of the military craziness is true (or true-ish). If you’re not, then this wacky movie is unlikely to persuade you, not even when Clooney demonstrates the “sparkly eyes” technique supposed to disarm and pacify hostile armies.

The Men Who Stare at Goats: George Clooney, Kevin Spacey

A companion piece of sorts to Three Kings and Clooney’s first film as director, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,The Men Who Stare at Goats casts a bemused eye over the madness of the military mindset, although it must be said that for most of its running time it’s fuzzy California transcendentalism that’s the source of the humour. At least until the rather unconvincing, farcical climax, which opts for feelgood hippie vibes and an LSD trip.

First time director Grant Heslov is an old associate of Clooney’s, and the screenwriter of Goodnight and Good Luck. His work here is unshowy and a bit flat, but at least he’s blessed with a sterling cast, which also includes Kevin Spacey as the badass apple in the Earth battalion, and Stephen Lang as a c.o. who believes he can walk through walls if he concentrates hard enough.
 

A companion piece of sorts to Three Kings and Clooney's first film as director, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Men Who Stare at Goats casts a bemused eye over the madness of the military mindset.

There’s a more serious film here, bubbling underneath, about the way the New Age philosophies of the 1970s were coopted, like everything else, into mercenary black ops for Imperial American war machine. That may even have been the movie Clooney and Heslov set out to make. But they never quite pull it off. This is too wild and wooly to hit the right subversive notes, and the framing story involving McGregor’s wide-eyed hack feels stale and unimaginative. There’s a cute irony in McGregor getting his head around the notion of Jedi warriors of course, but the character is too much of a straight man in every sense of the phrase.

There is some delicious material here, and there are a few unpalatable truths, but the movie is so locked into its own sense of absurdity it doesn’t dare to leave a nasty taste in our mouths – even though it really wants to.
 

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