Noble Failure.

Rating: 4/10 (28 November 2010)

Jon Ronson wrote the book this movie is based on. (Or was it Ron Johnson.) It must have been a pretty impressive novel otherwise the MBAs who greenlight these projects wouldn't have touched it with a ten- or even an eleven-foot pole. It brings together three elements that, perhaps in print, were seamlessly joined: comedy, nostalgia for the New Age, and social comment.
None of it works here, lamentably, despite the reasonably good performances by the leads and support and despite the competence of the director.
It's the script that's the problem. There ARE some amusing lines and funny moments in this story of a band of soldiers selected for duty in the Middle East because of their psychic powers. It's just that the funny lines and situations are so few and that they're so understated as to elicit wan smiles rather than chuckles -- and never mind laughter. My guess would be that the humor in the novel depended chiefly on internal monologues and the author's particular choice of descriptive phrases, rather than in the dialog or the situations themselves. That's a common problem with transposing comic novels to the screen, from "Ulysses" to "Lolita." And to whom is the nostalgia for New Age beliefs and activities addressed? Who's mind will click when they witness the kinds of tricks the Yippies pulled during the Vietnam war -- trying to levitate the Pentagon and whatnot? And much of the parody goes farther back in time than that, to the early 1960s, somewhere in the temporal vicinity of "Candy." It's a small audience indeed.
The social comment deals not just with the New Age but with even greater resonance with the war in the Middle East. We now have two wars going, or maybe two and a half. One is winding down in Iraq. "Winding down" here means we only have some 5,000 armed troops fighting and dying there. One in Afghanistan is fully blown. One in Pakistan is covert and is not happening at all.
The difficulty with the social comment is that these wars are so controversial and the country itself so polarized that nothing can be said about the conflicts. WHATEVER scene or statement reflects a value judgment is going to outrage half the population. The result is a chasm across which there is no tightrope. The actual wars -- the mercenary groups, the blood -- sort of loom in the background without being directly addressed.
Nope. It's not an insulting film. It doesn't treat the viewer as some recently evolved species of moral ape. It isn't dumbed down. It's just not successful in its enterprise. I'm tempted to give it a decoration just for taking as many chances with the audience as it does. But I can't recommend seeing it because it's so dull.