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Friday, Nov. 06, 2009

Movie Review: You might be better off staring at real goats

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" isn't worth more than two-and-a-half bleats.

Director Grand Heslov's overly jaunty adaptation of Jon Ronson's novel has the forced, strained feel of a dinnertable gag stretched into a feature-length film.

It's Wacky with a capital W, strenuous in its nudge-wink hilarity, assertive in its comic superiority. Hilarious in fits and starts, the film struggles to find its tone even as a powerhouse cast labors for laughs.

The Scottish superstar actor Ewan McGregor, affecting a flat American accent that grates a little, plays a lackadaisical reporter named Bob Wilton. After his cozy domestic existence is rattled by the breakup of his marriage, he flees to the Iraq War as a foreign correspondent.

There he bumps into an odd, hyperactive contractor (George Clooney doing his slightly-crazed-but-still-appealingly-rumpled routine), McGregor's character tumbles into a world of roadside thugs, desert chase scenes and a secret Pentagon program from the Vietnam era that trains "warrior monks" with psychic abilities.

In a series of flashbacks, we learn about the leader of the program, a drug-addled soldier named Bill Django (played by Jeff Bridges with a sweet, paunchy likability), who turns his unit into a free-for-all "New Earth Army."

There's a certain jolly bravado when it comes to watching U.S. Army personnel sporting hippie-length hair, chanting morning greetings to Mother Earth and twisting into various yoga positions.

The heart of the film's satire, of course, is that all these touchy-feely activities are tolerated by the Pentagon brass because of the possibility of using psychically enhanced soldiers as killing machines. (The title refers to soldiers trying to stop the hearts of goats through sheer will power.)

What's more, the U.S. is doing it because it thinks the old Soviet Union is conducting similar research -- and vice versa. So we manage to poke fun at both the callousness of the military mind and bureaucratic inefficiency.

But the ongoing gag isn't enough to flesh out the film's premise.

Even with the addition of a nasty psychic rival, played by Kevin Spacey, the conflict remains mostly inert.

What we're left with is a road trip of sorts in which we get to chuckle at McGregor, the "Star Wars" alumni, learning about the Army's secret "Jedi" program, alternating with flashbacks of the absurdity of flower-child soldiers.

When Heslov does descend into more realistic pointed satire, such as an amusing sequence in which two U.S. private security companies in modern-day Iraq end up fighting each other, it clashes with the goofier, more far-fetched parts of the narrative.

There have been a lot of cinematic satires of war over the years, and while this one does have some appealing moments, it certainly isn't one of the best.