THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS 2.0****


George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey…a strong cast. So you wonder could this be another “Ocean’s Eleven” or “Three Kings”. Well the answer is a resounding “NO….not even close. Since there’s a lot of desert scenery, it could be called “Sahorrorible Nein”…maybe not that bad but it does involve a lot of wandering around in a desolate script with more mirages than oasis.

So why does it miss the mark..…primarily because of a poor script, ineffective direction and a concept that just doesn’t cut it as a comedy/spoof or a docudrama. At times it veers close to being funny... and then veers off and comes close to satirizing American military tactics... and then veers off in another direction. Too much veering.

The film is based on the book by Jon Ronson who investigated the extraordinary activities of a "psychic unit" within the US army during current Iraq war. Styling themselves as Warrior Monks and Jedi Warriors no nutty scheme was too far-fetched to try out, from killing goats with an intense stare to mesmerizing the enemy with "sparkly eyes"….and even “running through walls”. In the film, McGregor is reporter named Bob Wilton who's hanging around in a Kuwaiti bar trying to get into Iraq to cover the war. There, he meets the charismatic, self-styled former "Jedi Warrior" Lyn Cassady (Clooney) who claims once to have been involved in the top-secret army unit. When Clooney sets off for Iraq on a supposedly hush-hush mission, McGregor tags and gets taken for a ride in every sense.

The story is presented through a series of flashbacks which tell of the origins of the paranormal unit, led by a ponytailed, chilled-out Bridges whose character is disenchanted by the atrocities he experienced in the Vietnam War. So he tries to find a kinder, gentler way of killing people by physic powers. After a reasonably short but robust start, the story quickly crumbles into a series of fragmented skits, patched together by a voice-over narration, generally a sign of last-minute emergency surgery in a movie.

It would have been a whole lot funnier if the goat had won out in the stare down contest.

Clark