Neither especially good or especially bad

Rating: 6/10 (9 April 2010)

Full of promise, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" has a potentially engaging premise - the front (today) and back (back then) story of a gifted psychic (Clooney) engaged by a secret cadre of the U.S. Army hoping to utilize their supposed psychic capabilities to find military men who have been kidnapped, find out what the enemy is doing remotely ("remote viewing" as it is called in New Agey circles), and so on - yet it ultimately falls flat.
Told in two time frames - early in the Iraq War (2003-ish) and in the late 70s/early 80s - it centers most precisely around Clooney's character, Lyn Cassidy. The story finds its way initially when Ewan McGregor's reporter, who, while slumming as a writer for a small town newspaper, picks up a story with a few-bricks-short-of-a-brickhouse Stephen Root who claims to have been a member of said super-secret Army platoon. Rightfully thinking him completely bonkers, McGregor's "Bob" dismisses the story until he discovers his wife is having an affair with his one-arm editor (go figure - that's how these things work in these bizzaro-type movies) and, in the throes of an existential crisis, he dashes off to Iraq, fatefully meeting Clooney's Cassidy - one of the prodigies of said super-secret military cadre - at a Kuwaiti hotel while waiting for clearance to cross the border into Iraq.
The movie is then basically a series of flashing back and moving forward to the more contemporary setting of the story, whence we learn more about Lyn's history with the New Earth Army Unit, a kind of proto-military hippie faction run by an ultra New Agey tree hugging ex-now-current hippie colonel, Jeff Bridge's Bill Django. Replete with '70s-era pop-psychology pablum and neologisms, Django is the long-haired hippie freak all the generals feared, yet suddenly embraced when the circumstances - notably a fear that the Russians might be developing psychic "super soldiers" (because THEY (the Russians, that is) thought the Americans were, but in fact they weren't, but now the Americans must because the Russians are because they think the American military is) - force them to accept the side show on their military base.
The movie never quite finds a workable bead of a plot. At times it is quite funny and Clooney is good as a somewhat spacey, somewhat enigmatic, somewhat obtuse well-intentioned ex-but-current psychic super soldier (we're never really sure). Bridges is great as Django - he has just the right amount of self-confident mellow ebullience to be a believable hippie guru type, and McGregor relaxes his way along as a Midwestern reporter who is smart, but really doesn't have much of a clue about all that he is encountering. It's darn funny when Clooney starts talking about "YOU need to be a Jedi Warrior!" and McGregor says "I don't know what this is - what is a Jedi Warrior?" given his history with the Star Wars series.
But, as interesting as the back story is (and who knows what portion of it may or may not be true) the story set in Iraq kind of meanders its way along and seems vague and pointless, even if it's meant to in a way contribute to the back story and vice-versa. The modern-day events seem disconnected to their relationship with the New Earth Army and I found myself rapidly losing interest in the modern day story.
It's difficult to wholly recommend "Goats" to a sane viewer even as a passable movie; it does have a certain charm to it and I was kind of fascinated with the improbable nature of the back story of the New Earth Army and the characters that peopled it. There's a lot of heavy hitters on this one - Clooney, McGregor, Bridges, Spacey - but it might have been more entertaining as an independent film without so much weight that the big stars brought unnecessarily to it. Then again, it's not likely it would have found mainstream distribution had it been resigned to that category.
All in all, I don't think I'd bother to see this again. It's all a bit too weird to fully recommend even as entertainment.