Director: Grant Heslov
Stars: George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey
Rating: R for language, brief nudity, drug content
Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes
“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is the kind of movie where, if you see a car carrying characters you like hit a roadside bomb, flip in the air and land on its roof — you laugh out loud.
It's that tongue in cheek. Everybody in it talks craziness with a stone face.
And those are some famous faces blurting out hippy-dippy jargon about parapsychology while taking part in one far-out shenanigan after another.
Ewan McGregor is Bob, a newspaper writer who stumbles on the weird story of a secret Army unit that experiments with using powers of the mind to fight war: training super soldiers to have superpowers.
A marital breakup sends Bob fleeing to Iraq to scare the wife. Instead, it just scares Bob as he trails after the most talented of the secret unit's mentalists, Lyn (George Clooney).
Lyn claims to be able to stop the beating heart of a goat by staring at it. He says he can use remote viewing powers to find anything in the world. But that doesn't stop him from landing himself and Bob in one ridiculous predicament after another. And all of them are good for laughs.
McGregor is essentially a straight man (skeptic) to Clooney's wild-eyed eccentricities.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bridges plays Bill, author of the secret unit's nonsensical training manual. He got his own training in the new-age, drug-addled era of free love and Vietnam. He wears a braided ponytail like Willie Nelson, and he embraces the peace-and-love practice of handing out white daisies to hard-faced soldiers.
The unit's Judas is a humorless egotist named Larry (Kevin Spacey), who can't stand the idea that he's less gifted than Lyn. So he schemes to discredit both Lyn and Bill.
“Goats,” based on Jon Ronson's nonfiction book by the same name, veers sharply into fiction, dropping the book's dark tone in favor of oddball comedy. The movie isn't interested in sticking it to the Pentagon over tax dollars dubiously spent as the Cold War ebbed. It just asks us to laugh at the absurdity.
Luckily, all four principal players have a knack for this kind of comedy. Watching them, you smile not only at the laughs played out on-screen but also imagining all the laughs they had off-screen while making this movie.
Fun and farce are nice. A movie that fires on all cylinders might be nicer.
First-time director Grant Heslov, who produced and acted in several earlier Clooney pictures, seems more adept at getting a spark out of his actors than at shaping a narrative that has a consistent point of view or, better yet, something to say. It takes too long to set this thing up, and flashbacks and voice-over tend to make muddled material murkier.
Screenwriter Peter Straughan scores laughs off the jarring contrast between what these mental acrobats claim to be able to do and what trips them up. It's funny to watch somebody charge toward a wall, expecting to walk through it, only to wind up moaning in a crumpled heap.
But unlike in the book, the door is left open about whether some of those special powers are real.
Ah, well. We're not supposed to take anything here seriously. The joy is in watching Clooney, Bridges, McGregor and Spacey turn flakier than the Pillsbury Doughboy's biscuits.
Contact the writer:
444-1269, bob.fischbach@owh.com
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