Uinspiring waste

Rating: 4/10 (26 June 2010)

A drab shell of a movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats has a little humor, a little drama, and a little action, but too little of any one thing to warrant a second look. It's aimless and largely laughless, despite a top-name cast.
Ewan McGregor plays a small-time U.S. journalist named Bob Wilton, who meets a man named Lyn Cassady, played by George Clooney, to claims to have taken part in a secret army unit that trained in the use of paranormal abilities to help win the war through fairly peaceful means, in a program called the New Earth Army. Cassady believes he's been given a mission by the group's leader, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), so he heads into Iraq with Bob in tow.
Truly, it's entertaining to see George Clooney, well, act, but despite his efforts here and his chemistry with McGregor (great swaths of the movie are of the buddy-pic variety), it's a doomed, wasted performance. Wilton and Cassady run into the sort of troubles you'd expect a single U.S. soldier and a journalist to run into in Iraq, including getting taken hostage by a mercenary "security" detail that's ostensibly there to help keep the peace. Where's it all leading? Well, no place special, it turns out.
Director Grant Heslov has trouble weaving the various tones and atmospheres together into a cogent movie. Cassady seems like a nice guy who may or may not have actual psychic abilities; Wilton seems befuddled or paranoid almost all of the time. Bridges is spacey; Kevin Spacey is a venomous coparticipant in the New Agey program. But they all seem to be in different movies.
Many references are made to Jedi Knights, that the men who were in the New Earth Army – which is as hippy-dippy as it gets – are the peaceful warriors who use their mind tricks to win hearts and minds. Of course, McGregor himself appeared in three Star Wars films as a Jedi Knight, which makes one wonder if the producers scanned their Rolodexes for actors who had been actual virtual Jedi Knights already. Hooray for serendipity, huh? At any rate, Cassady is supposed to be on the Good Side of the Force (which isn't mentioned by name, but you know that's what they meant), and Spacey's Larry Hooper is supposed to be on the Dark Side – probably because he wants to use psychic powers for violent means. But rest assured, there's no killing (of humans) to be done in this movie using thinking caps.
So what is the point? It's an interesting story that Bob gets to tell his readers, but it feels a little underdeveloped here. The movie would have been better if it had stuck to a particular tone, whether it was slapstick or a straight-forward action movie. Either would have helped form a more cohesive plot. What we get instead was a jumble of personalities and factory-seconds puzzle pieces; it's as if the movie wanted to be existential and concrete at the same time. Call it Schroedinger's Movie.