You may not be sure what to expect from the trailers for ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’. They feature, among other things: a mustachioed George Clooney stopping a goat’s heart just by giving it a menacing glare, Jeff Bridges doing hippy shenanigans, Kevin Spacey with a silly haircut poking people in the forehead, and a very bewildered Ewan McGregor as a journalist who doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea what’s going on.
The movie is a comedy about a Special Forces unit in the United States military called the New Earth Army – operatives that are trained to have psychic powers, such as precognition, instant information gathering, the ability to know where someone is from anywhere in the world, and (of course) the ability to kill a goat just by staring at it.
Clooney, Bridges and Spacey are all former members of the New Earth Army, and McGregor plays a reporter who stumbles into the world of psychic warfare in pursuit of the next big story – and finds there’s more than he can handle.
Three things are indeed funny in ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’:
1) Throughout the movie, there are fully grown men like Clooney and Bridges acting incredibly silly. There are more and better goofy hippy antics in this movie than any I’ve seen in at least the past five years. With soundtrack so full of classic rock, it’s very enjoyable, and definitely entertaining.
2) There is a delicious bit of irony in seeing Clooney explaining the ways of the Jedi (the movie’s term for the “psychic warrior-monks” of the New Earth Army) to McGregor, especially if you consider that McGregor played Obi-Wan Kenobi in episodes one through three of ‘Star Wars’. It’s funnier because at any given time, McGregor has trouble grasping what he is hearing and then usually winds up being hurt by Clooney in the course of his explanation.
3) In the beginning of the movie there’s a bump card that says more of this is true than you might believe, and it’s apparently not a joke – the movie is based on a nonfiction book of the same name by author Jon Ronson.
Once you become used to those, however, the movie seems to fall apart. The story is not very engaging when it’s not trying to be funny, and there’s more seriousness involved than really necessary. The only actors that really get the necessary time to shine are McGregor and Clooney, which seems like a bit of a waste, considering Kevin Spacey typically makes any movie great just by being in it.
Spacey’s brilliant performance quality (such as that seen in ‘Seven’) is lost here in favor of silly hippy antics. And unfortunately, the last thirty minutes of the movie fall off the beaten path entirely. While initially funny, once the movie’s absurdity starts to be shadowed by anything remotely serious it loses its quality, and once that happens it’s hard to enjoy the silliness again.
More than anything, ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’ shows you why being absurd in such a serious world is considered absurd in the first place. It’s a difference you can see all throughout the movie. Even though it will never confirm whether or not these men with mustaches have real psychic powers, it’s good for a few laughs – at least for a while.
Grade: C
