The Men Who Stare at Goats: Let Me Call Ewe Sweetheart

The Men Who Stare at Goats: Let Me Call Ewe Sweetheart
By Pete Misiak
WXYZ-TV Entertainment Reporter


It's gotta be great to be George Clooney. He's movie-star handsome (surprise!), filthy rich, has lots of high-profile friends, owns a great house in Italy, and best of all, HE CAN APPEAR IN ANY FILM PROJECT HE DESIRES. He's got that kind of power in Hollywood. He's not on the A-list, he's on the A+list. If his life was a newspaper, he'd be a front-page story (above the fold), right under the headline, "Clooney Has it All." 

Gerorgie-boy obviously wasn't looking to make movie history when he got involved in this latest effort, The Men Who Stare at Goats. He probably just wanted to get aboard a project that was fun. This uneven comedy may have looked like a sure-fire romp on the printed page, and he and director Grant Heslov (Good Night, and Good Luck), who are listed in the credits as the film's producers, brought in a strong supporting cast--Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey--to give the project depth and marquee value. Unfortunately, all this is not quite enough. The Men Who Stare at Goats is almost a good movie.  

Struggling reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) gets the scoop of a lifetime when he meets Lyn Cassady (Clooney), who claims to be from a unit of psychic soldiers that has been reactivated for duty. Intrigued by Cassady's assertions that they can walk through walls and kill goats by fixed gazes, Wilton follows him on a dangerous, top-secret mission across Iraq to find the brigade's founder, Bill Django (Bridges).

Based on the nonfiction book by Jon Ronson, the movie claims that the U.S. military developed a secret cadre in the 1980s code-named "Jedi warriors."



"What's a Jedi warrior?" innocently asks McGregor, who actually played one in the Star Wars prequels. Very funny. Not so funny (at least around these parts) is the reference to Wilton being a reporter for an Ann Arbor newspaper. Sorry, Ann Arbor no longer has its own newspaper. Nice try, guys.

Particularly unfulfilling is a dead-end subplot about the military's New Earth Army led by new-age hippie Django (Bridges). A Viet Nam vet, Django dropped lots of LSD in order to develop the skills of a "warrior monk." Bridges seems to be channeling "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski, only instead of bowling and white russians he's got self-described mystic powers.

Goats is a shaggy dog story--it's supposed to be based on fact--and along the way, when not getting lost, blown up and abducted by both terrorists and private contractors, Clooney's Cassady reveals details about the military's secret psychic soldier program seen in flashbacks narrated, confusingly, by McGregor's Wilton. But the government's sense of happy, sometimes drug-fueled camaraderie is undermined by the arrival of a new recruit, ambitious, arrogant faker Larry Hooper (Spacey), whose envy of Cassady’s abilities leads him to destroy the unit.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is merely a slight, innocuous diversion. It depends on how tolerant you are of such meanderings as to how much you will enjoy it. Unfortunately, it's also one of those movies that has its best moments in the previews. And the previews are always better than the movie itself.
 
Even if you're George Clooney.


The Men Who Stare at Goats
Rated: R
Running Time: 93 minutes


Pete Misiak is an award-winning news anchor and reporter at WJR-AM 760 and is also a member of WXYZ.com's Web Team. A former Big Band singer with Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, Pete earned membership into Actors' Equity Association in 1982 and has appeared in over 60 productions as an actor and performer.