The Men Who Stare at Goats Review

Yesterday I forewent my normal slate of Thursday evening television in favor of an advanced screening of The Men Who Stare at Goats. Big mistake. Let's just say if they made a movie about me in the theater it would be titled The Man Who Stares at His Watch.The movie wasn't awful, it certainly had a few bright spots that made me chuckle, but I couldn't help feeling disappointed. The cast was superb; George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges and Ewan McGregor all have the capacity to turn in great comedic performances, they just didn't (or couldn't).

The plot of The Men Who Stare at Goats (I use word 'plot' loosely in this instance) revolves around a reporter, Bob (McGregor), who travels to Iraq right after the US invasion in 2003 in search of a story (and to impress his wife, who has just left him for his editor). While waiting in Kuwait to enter Iraq, Bob meets Lyn (Clooney) at the hotel bar. McGregor soon discovers that Lyn was a member of a secret military unit of "psychic spies and jedi masters". Fascinated, Bob decides to write a story about this unit and tags along with Lyn into Iraq. The second act of the movie involves a series of flashbacks where we are filled in on the Lyn's backstory and the history of his psychic military unit called the New Earth Army. Bridges plays Bill, the founder of the New Earth Army and Larry (Spacey) is a jealous recruit who eventually brings down the unit. The movie really runs off the tracks in the third act. Clooney and McGregor, lost in the desert, stumble across a secret psychic compound run by Larry in conjunction with a burnt out Bill. Psychic experiments, which bear an uncanny resemblance to torture, are being performed upon Iraqi prisoners as well as goats. McGregor, Clooney and Bridges decide it is up to them to free both the men and the animals. They achieve this by distracting Larry and his comrades with a large dosage of LSD spiked into the compound's drinking water. If this sounds bizarre and somewhat difficult to follow/comprehend, its because it is.

The Men Who Stare at Goats felt like a Coen brothers movie, only without the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle, e.i. Walter Sobchak) nuances that make their movies so good. Lyn reminded me a little of the character Cloondog played in Burn After Reading and Bridges' Bill was the Dude if he had followed Walter into the Army during 'Nam. Both actors are Coen brothers veterans, so you would think that they would be able to recognize a disjointed, wanna-be Coen brothers script when the saw one.

The saddest thing about this movie is that midway through I remembered that I had seen George Clooney in the deserts of Iraq before and even with far inferior costars (Ice Cube, Marky Mark and Jamie Kennedy), I would have much rather watched Three Kings again than sit through the remainder of 'Goats.