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Visual:		6.0
Audio:		5.0
Acting:		8.0
Writing:		7.0
Score:		7.0

Director(s):	Grant Heslov
Writer(s):	Peter Straughan (screenplay), Jon Ronson (book)
Starring:	Ewan McGregor • George Clooney • Jeff Bridges • Kevin Spacey • Robert Patrick • Stephen Root • Stephen Lang • Glenn Morshower
Genre:	Comedy • War
Website:	http://www.themenwhostareatgoatsmovie.com/
Release Date:	November 06, 2009
Rated:

“More of this is true than you would believe.”

And so begins The Men Who Stare at Goats, the very amusing political comedy based on journo Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book of the same name. The film, written by screenwriter Peter Straughan, operates on roughly the same level as his previous film How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, also based on a journalist’s real-life findings. Straughan took the unbelievable story of the US military’s funding of a “Jedi Warrior” division and gives it a loose through-line and many-a comic mischiefs.

Ewan McGregor is small-town reporter Bob Wilton, who after his wife left him for his editor, decides to go to Iraq in 2003 and write a story about the newly started war. He fails to even enter the country, but finds both an opening and a potentially far more interesting story when he runs into ex-special forces soldier Lyn Cassady (played with hilarious bug-eyed quirk by George Clooney). Cassady spills to Wilton about Project Jedi, a new age army squad back in the 1980’s founded by hippie Vietnam vet Bill Django (an in-his-element Jeff Bridges) that researched the use of psychic abilities in combat—apparently given funding by President Reagan because he was a Star Wars fan. The name of this film comes from an experiment in which Jedi Warriors try to kill goats by staring at them.

True story? Who knows. It is a fun story, nonetheless.

The bulk of the film consists of Wilton and Cassady wandering around the desert getting into various troubles. The plot is incredibly vague: Cassady is heading towards a secret location in Iraq and Wilton tags along. Cassady allows this because he sees psychic potential in Wilton (“The Force is strong in this one”). The terms Jedi and The Force are used many many times in the movie—to the point where I expected a George Lucas shout-out in the credits—and act as a recurring in-joke with McGregor since he was Obi-Wan Kenobi. Oddly enough, the gag doesn’t get old, probably because the movie doesn’t put any emphasis on it.

Amidst the silliness, there are some half-baked political commentaries shoved in, which is to be expected, but here feels rather lazy. A random Iraqi character shows up and serves as a detour for Wilton and Cassady, only so it can make the point that both Americans and Iraqis have bad apples and are not representative of the two countries as wholes. Yeah—verrry perceptive. It also takes the time to point out that private security firms operating in Iraq actually made its streets a lot more dangerous thanks to their incompetency, which is depicted in a humorous scene where two firms engage in a shootout, each thinking the other are insurgents.

Occasionally, the movie flashbacks (accompanied by semi-grating voiceover by Wilton) to Cassady’s army days, training under Django and his unusual methods. It’s through this that we meet Larry Hooper (a delightfully smarmy Kevin Spacey, who plays a wonderful prick), another Jedi Warrior who’s jealous of Cassady’s psychic talents. The Men Who Stare at Goats is largely carried by its actors, using their distinct charm to elevate the mostly plain material. Clooney, Bridges and Spacey are all insane in their own ways, while McGregor’s typical hysterics brings a good straight man / audience surrogate for all the craziness than ensue.

What’s interesting about Psychic Op is that over the years, it has morphed into Psychological Op. “You can turn invisible?” Wilton probes Cassady at one point. “Well, that was the goal,” he answers. “Eventually we settled on just not being seen.” Everything else follows the same route, since superpowers are of course unattainable. The psychic warfare of the Cold War gets updated into the current war as psychological warfare—which makes the film a long-winded criticism of the use of sensory interrogation methods as ridiculous and ineffective as trying to develop Jedi powers.

While the movie is somewhat forgettable and its satire not nearly as pointed as it wants to be, it’s still a consistently chuckle-worthy film, somewhere between Burn After Reading and Three Kings in potency. Too bad it arrives at an awkward time, too early to detach itself from current events but too late to actually be timely. The film has the flavor of Coen Brothers Lite. Maybe in a few years, it can find an appreciative cult audience the way Coens’ offbeat comedies tend to.