A movie that ends where it was headed - nonsense in nowhere.

Rating: 1/10 (20 April 2010)

Even the collection of great actors Clooney, Bridges, McGregor, and Spacey was not enough to give this movie a reason to watch. I'm convinced that this movie was written while the author was at a party with friends and was stoned or high. It must have been a group effort with each friend providing their ideas for the story and each one is included.
There is essentially no plot. One can hardly even write a synopsis of this film - but we try. "Looser journalist Bob Wilton, desperate to make some kind of mark in his world and impress his wayward adulterous wife, decides to take at face value the story of one certified lunatic. To get the story, Wilton must track down lunatics #2 & #3 to research the story. In the process #2 takes him on a journey through Iraq through what is a drug-head trip and Wilton converts himself into a lunatic. Wilton becomes his imagination and lives as if it is his reality." That might make a good story but, it doesn't have the cohesiveness to make any sense and each unbelievable event has no or very little connection to the rest of the film. Some of the events are funny such as when #2 stares at a cloud in and effort to practice his "cloud bursting" skill, he takes his eyes off the road in a flat dessert and runs into the only rock able to total his vehicle. It must have been the revenge of the cloud that placed the rock in the middle of the flat road. When finally we get to see #2 stare at a goat, the joke is dead, as dead as the goat and not at all funny.
There is a funny part, when the whole "camp" is fed LSD by #3 in its breakfast of eggs and in its drinking water. The troops begin to trip and actually do things that are hilarious. Some get into a tank and drive it through the security gate and into the desert with no destination or mission, it goes back and forth in the background of the following scenes. The breach in the fence allows the prisoners of war, - oh, this post was a holding jail for captured enemy we see - to escape into the desert. Again the problem is, it has no connection to the rest of the story.
Without a story, there can be no climax and no ending so the writers and director have Lunatic #2 & #3 fly off into the sun in a helicopter (that seems to come out of nowhere) leaving Wilton, now certified lunatic #4 to "carry on the mission". We ask, what mission? The copter literally flies off into the sun like the cowboy rides off into the sunset in a western. But that is not then ending after all. We are smitten with having to watch Wilton go back home and come to terms with a wife that prefers another man and maybe that is what was needed for his peace of mind all along - to be rid of an unloving woman both physically and emotionally.