the men who stare at goats

George Clooney and Ewan McGregor star in the latest version of a buddy picture or a road movie- a buddies on the road movie. Crosby and Hope meet Falk and Arkin in "The In-laws On the Road to Iraq".  (I kept expecting Clooney's Falk to yell out to McGregor's Arkin, "Serpentine!!") The film is funny and imaginative.  While watching it, I thought, "this is a good movie, I'm enjoying this." But when it was over I was left thinking - "eh." The ending was flat.  And yet I really can't expect more than that because any road picture is about the journey not the destination, so this picture can be forgiven for it's dead end.  Who can remember why Bing and Bob went anywhere? The point was for them to go.

If you've seen the trailer than you know the plot: the army experiments with creating psychic soldiers-real life jedi warriors- with a variety of successes.  As a history student I read about these episodes and know that this is based in some truth. For instance- the U.S. only began these experiments because they found out that the Russians had opened a military psychic research division which they began only because they read and believed an article the French wrote about the U.S. doing it. This is true and illustrates the mental capacity with which we are dealing. And then we've all heard about the military's LSD research.

But the story isn't really the point, it's a boys club having fun. Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Robert Patrick and Stephen Lang are other club members who play their very one dimensional parts with lots of relish.  Clooney has carved out a niche for himself playing this kind of zealous nut job on a mission.  I have to say, as much as I love Ewan McGregor, the choice of him in this role was distracting.  In this movie there was a lot of discussion about jedi warriors and Clooney's charactor told McGregor's character to find the jedi inside of him.  Ewan played  Obi-Wan Kenobi for chrisstsake.  You don't tell Obi-Wan to find his inner jedi.  It diverted my attention and pulled me out of the movie. Maybe they thought it would be ironic or funny, but no, it was annoying.  Maybe one reference with a big wink to the camera would have been ok, but  Clooney kept trying to teach Obi-Wan how to do jedi mind tricks!!! Big mistake in casting.

So, as a movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is not great.  But for a laugh it does the job.

PS- For my animal sensitive readers, there are some incidences in which animals are threatened with violence but nothing is done on camera- it's all in reference.  What I found more disturbing was all the footage of George W. Bush- much scarier.