“More of this story is true than you would believe,” we are told in the opening moments of The Men Who Stare at Goats. It’s a fair warning and one that bears repeating the further the film slides into incredulity and absurdity. Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction. No doubt intended as the comic antidote to a slew of unsuccessful and largely critically lampooned Iraq war films, The Men Who Stare at Goats instead enthusiastically joins their ranks as a pretentious and eternally monotonous military satire.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on the book by British journalist Jon Ronson and directed by Grant Heslov, who co-wrote the superb Good Night, and Good Luck, is about a top-secret brigade of soldiers trained to be psychic warriors. Educated in New Age philosophy and paranormal research, the men envision an Army without weapons, that stops foes in their tracks with telepathic mind control, and that uses its vast resources to spread love and personal bliss around the world. And the U.S. Army sponsored all of this. Really. You can’t make this stuff up.

Ewan McGregor is Bob Wilton, a struggling journalist from a small paper in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who drops everything to become a war correspondent after his wife leaves him for his editor. In Kuwait, while waiting for a permit to enter Iraq, he meets Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney). Lyn has stories of being trained by a hippie officer (a pony-tailed Jeff Bridges, essentially channeling his Dude character from The Big Lebowski) to become a Jedi warrior (an in-joke that is hilarious the first time around given McGregor’s presence in the film—he played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the most recent Star Wars films—but loses something on or about, oh, the dozenth revisiting), running through solid walls and killing goats just by looking at them. Bob realizes the war isn’t the story; the story is sitting right across the table.

Most of Lyn’s stories are viewed in flashback and it is here where the film makes the most sense, if sense you can call it. The framing story, on the other hand, is dreadfully dull and contrived as Bob follows Lyn into Iraq on what may or may not be a covert, black ops mission. The fun lies in watching the men learn their “art” (all of which can be explained away by a preoccupied third-grader with an elementary grasp of logic and rationality), which more often than not means ingesting LSD and tripping out. Bridges, Clooney and Kevin Spacey (playing an ambitious psychic who, at one point, congratulates a happy couple at a wedding reception and adds, “Sorry it doesn’t work out between you two”) complement each other nicely. Clooney, who has made a career filling the shoes of the likes of Cary Grant, isn’t afraid to come across as an imbecile and we love him for it. In fact, each man is a solid dramatic actor who knows how to be equally funny. Too bad the same can’t be said for this movie.

At more than one point in this film I found myself thinking, “Much of this is genuinely amusing. So why then am I not laughing?” Uneven and unfocused, The Men Who Stare at Goats alternates between hilarity and tedium. It is a joke missing a punch line. While the set-up certainly has its own pleasures, there is no payoff to speak of. It’s as if the narrative teases us along only to deflate the instant the closing credits come near. After all, it’s not as if these warrior monks and their New Earth Army actually succeeded in anything. Instead, the film concocts a rickety finale that draws together all the faces from the flashbacks and tries to distract us with a high-minded, incongruously sober screed on torture that feels tacked on at the last minute. When Bob has the metaphysical temerity to wonder aloud what it was all about, Lyn mutters something about him “telling the world what happened here,” before ascending into the clouds. A worthy goal if anything actually had.

If looks could really kill, this film would already be dead.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.