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The Men Who Stare at Goats takes a promising premise of U.S. soldiers wielding paranormal powers as weapons of peace and a strong-enough cast to pull it off, and squanders it all on an uneven comedy that grows increasingly dull as it wears on.

Director Grant Heslov, primarily an actor whose brief directorial resume includes the quirky comedy Par 6, never develops a memorable or substantive style for the film, and is content to let The Men Who Stare at Goats amble along until it runs out of steam.

By the start of its third act, the movie's humor scatters like cockroaches on the kitchen floor even as the plot grows sillier - and by extension, more desperate - by the minute.

Based on events the story suggests are more true than we'd care to believe, The Men Who Stare at Goats introduces us to Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) an Ann Arbor newspaper reporter who stumbles across the story of a former member of a covert group of psychic spies for the U.S. Army known as the First Earth Battalion.

Wilton craves real journalism, and after his wife leaves him for his one-armed editor, he leaves the safety and security of Ann Arbor to cover the war in Iraq.

In a hotel lounge one night in the Middle East he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), also a former member of the First Earth Battalion.

Wilton listens to Cassady's crazy stories of the battalion's formation by former leader Bill Django (Jeff Bridges, channeling an older, flakier Dude), and the types of powers the soldiers were trained in, including walking through walls, locating people thousands of miles away, and killing goats by intensive, prolonged stares. Possessing such mind control has led the soldiers to refer to themselves as "Jedi Warriors" who act as agents of peace rather than war.

Desperate for a story, Wilton accompanies Cassady on a covert operation into Iraq to rescue Django, who is confined to a military base under the command of Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey, who appears to be sleepwalking through the role), the Benedict Arnold of the First Earth Battalion, who orchestrated the group's demise in the 1980s.

Wilton doesn't know what to make of Cassady, who has the mental power to disburse a cloud formation, but not the ability to avoid crashing their car into the lone large rock in the road of front of them.

Both McGregor and Clooney seem to be having a good deal of fun in their roles, but the big-picture question of whether Cassady is or isn't a psychic powerhouse with Jedi-like abilities is never fully answered, perhaps wisely. The Men Who Stare at Goats prefers to keep such revelations to itself, much like another examination of a too-good-to-be-true military escapade, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which, coincidentally, marked Clooney's directorial debut.

Whereas Confessions of a Dangerous Mind tempered the fantastical with a dark, almost sinister edge, The Men Who Stare at Goats lacks any such subversive elements, other than the conclusion that the post-Vietnam U.S. military is desperate enough to try just about anything.

Much of the film's problems are inherited from its source material, a 2004 nonfiction book of the same name by Jon Ronson (himself the director of the illuminating documentary Stanley Kubrick's Boxes). Ronson's work was part hard-hitting investigative piece, part Ripley's Believe It or Not, and was never meant for the big screen, despite the best efforts of screenwriter Peter Straughan (How to Lose Friends & Alienate People).

Tasked with filling in the necessary plot to connect the people and events featured in the book, Straughan stretches the film to the point of absurdity.

The Men Who Stare at Goats wants to be a modern-day Dr. Strangelove, a twisted and poignant comedic dissection of military minds and operations. Instead, it's the Saturday Night Live sketch that opens with promise but runs out of laughs, and fails to realize it.

Contact Kirk Baird at:
kbaird@theblade.com
or 419-724-6734.