Generally well reigned in and free of any really nasty; the film can be episodic and often staggers around, but it is a dizzy black comedy I generally took to.

Rating: 6/10 (5 December 2011)

The film begins with a male character, of whom we have to presume is of a rather informed ilk given the certificates and qualifications draped over his office walls, doing something we conclude to be rather stupid. Staring intensely at a wall opposite him, focusing on it as if his life depended on it, the individual takes a running charge before meeting the stretch of plaster and mortar head on and rebounding backwards - landing painfully on his back. Thus begins the commonplace tone of the film; that is to say, its following of somewhat informed people, with very specific experiences in life, shambling their way into situations that were always going to get a lot worse before they got any better following a string of misguided conscientious decisions.
For the most part, The Men Who Stare at Goats covers a certain Bob Wilton, played by Ewan McGregor; a journalist based in the state of Michigan who voluntarily ends up in The Middle East when a longtime female partner leaves him for a three-limed wielding combat veteran of whom, in her estimation, is the better catch. His escape from this arrives in the venturing to the nation of Kuwait, wherein he will meet up with a man in the form of Lyn Cassady (Clooney) – a man initially dismissed as a bit of a kook, but a man Wilton decides to stick things out with when it transpires he has a back-story to do with certain lost divisions of the American Army. Wilton, angry out of the collapse of his partnership with a woman that left him for a man who fought for his country and experienced warfare to the degree that he did, appears to do what he does in The Middle East out of an immense feeling of inferiority. What Wilton uncovers is the fact that Cassady was more involved in a department built on both the research and practise of people eliminating others via the power they wield in their minds - a sort of murderous telepathy designed to strike down the enemy without even raising a finger.
Initially dismissing the idea as nonsense, the film covers Wilton's inception into Cassady's world of psychological warfare and illicit mind-tricks apparently capable of dropping an enemy on the strength of concentration and mental verve. Needless to say, it is Wilton's film wherein we may see him uncover the makeshift reality of the situation Cassady talks about, and this is in spite of the fact Clooney and his character steal the show as both a foil and as something allowing Wilton to put aside his marital issues and get involved in something genuinely engaging aside from faux-quests of masculinity. The film covers the pair of them hitting the road so as to travel to Iraq - something which will lead them closer to, amongst other things, those of whom Cassady speaks that were always more broadly linked to the mind control division; the film mutating into a buddy comedy road movie of sorts, the juxtaposition of falling back onto something as familiar and as carefree as such whilst delivering this wild premise working to decent success.
During the trip, Cassady's back-story involving a spaced out Jeff Bridges character and this meeting through a bit of an episode in the Vietnam War is told parallel with the present trek; a bumping into an American contractor sees Robert Patrick do his best in reenacting that of what Ben Kingsley pulled off in the recent, and similarly toned, 2008 film "War Inc.", as this brash and seemingly spoof all-powerful; all-conquering optimisation of America's attitude on foreign affairs. The film is about a story which is ultimately, and away from the offbeat nature of it as well as the quirksome nature of what transpires throughout, tragic and doom-laden.
There is an eventual sense of immense sadness as to how these men linked to this specific American Army division come to just observe their lives capitulate around them. Yet the director, a certain Grant Heslov and here treading a very fine line very well, has the guts to construct certain things about these happenings as quite funny; as if we might find it amusing. The film just about gets away with it, primarily out of the fact these men and their world is explored from the perspective of an outsider raw to what those therein have been involved in all this time – the film is an amusing comedy but a sad film depicting weary people with beliefs they've held on to for years beginning to fall apart before their very eyes. We enjoy certain episodes within and the odd couple pairing of the journalist with the soldier; the masculinity indulging, looking for warfare Wilton with the ultimately pacifist Cassady – itself a pairing amusingly subverting what we might typically expect of a respective Clooney and McGregor role. On other occasions, it falls over its feet when a kidnap sequence on account of some insurgents feels trivialised when flashbacks to the wacky past quench the horror of the present situation, but flaws aside, and there are rather-a few, the film treads water enough for it to make the grade.