Ah, that silly ol' military

Rating: 5/10 (4 November 2009)

More funny than not is about the nicest thing I'll say for The Men Who Stare At Goats, the directorial debut of actor-writer-producer Grant Heslov. Based on Jon Ronson's reportorial book of the same name, the film follows small-town journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan MacGregor) as he travels to Iraq to investigate the Army's weird "psychic spy" program in the company of disgraced special-ops "jedi" Lyn Cassady (George Clooney).
Clooney is doing his wild-eyed huckster thing again, and doing it well enough. Jeff Bridges as the hippy founder of the psychic unit is in pure The Dude territory mode, and it's a pleasure to watch him as always. There's gags, also stunts, guffaws as well. Heslov's film, though, suffers from a lack of cohesion, collecting together a bunch of gag-highlights that while funny never really work as natural beats inside a structured, satisfying narrative. Instead they're loosey-goosey, related as anecdotes by Cassady, and the effect of that choice combined with a related-but-at-a-stretch sub-plot about MacGregor's Wilton needing to go to Iraq to prove himself leaves the film feeling too carefree, too disjointed, too stop and start. It's funny, but it's got no groove.
It also has no bite. The film has some laughs, some well-written scenes inside a meandering story, but one can't help feeling put-off by the sheer toothlessness of the satire. At whom is this gentle ribbing aimed? At what? The goofiness of the Army? Oh you goofy old war machine you, with your torture and black sites and the bombing and the Abu Ghraibing, you rascal. At hippies from the 70's? 10 years ago Clooney starred in Three Kings, one of the angriest, most cynically funny war films of the past 40 years, and now, two seemingly unending wars later, we're gifted a mild poke in the ribs at the crazy internal operations of that lovable wacky ol' institution, the Armed Forces of the U.S. of A. It's less an evisceration and more of a needling light-hearted love letter, and as a result, it's boring and borderline offensive in its laziness.
Had the film been tighter the moral weight of the film's choice to gently "satirize" the military wouldn't have been an issue, perhaps. It might have been able to exist as a story, appreciable as a unique narrative within the framework of the Psy-Ops program. But because the film is so scattershot in tone and implication, so wide and unfocused, it feels like a bunch of half-hearted slaps rather than the straight-right we know Clooney, Heslov et. al are capable of.