Goats is gruff, but brings laughs

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Directed by Grant Heslov
Starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey
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If you're one of the almost 20,000 Canadians who identify themselves as Jedi on their census forms, then your Jesus Christ Superstar has arrived in the form of The Men Who Stare at Goats, the almost-true story of the real life American First Earth Battalion. It tells the story of a group of “Jedi” trained by a specialist in the American army to be psychic warriors, their trials, tribulations, and the goats that love them.

Ewan McGregor provides the voice of (almost) sanity that this film needs as the mild-mannered reporter Bob Wilton. Bob is working for a small-town paper, and married to a beautiful woman when a chance interview connects him with one of the purported Jedi. This, along with the sudden divorce from his wife who leaves him for his editor, propels Bob into a meeting with Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney), Jedi master extraordinaire, and sets him on an adventure that will reach across the world and back.

Through the eyes and ears of Wilton and the stories of Cassidy, we are introduced to the First Earth Battalion and its leader Bill Django (Jeff Bridges). After an experience in Vietnam, Bill decides that the best way he can help the army is by training a group of psychic spies, to use the power of the mind to win wars and distract the enemy using abilities such as the “sparkling eyes technique.” This spiritual quest unites him with a platoon of soldiers including Cassidy, and a theatrical psychic named Larry Hooper, portrayed by the always-hilarious Kevin Spacey.

This wild and unbelievable story should have been fractured and confusing, but the way it's presented to the audience makes it easy to digest. Broken down into chunks surrounding the present day adventures of Lyn and Bob in a foreign and hostile country, information is revealed at almost the perfect rate. The audience is not overwhelmed by back-story, but by the end of the film, a surprisingly deep and well-connected story has been told.

Everything fits together nicely and the movie has all the telltale signs of a really well put together script and it should — The Men Who Stare at Goats was on the 2006 Blacklist, a list of the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, and thus has excellent pedigree behind it. Even when flipping rapidly between kidnappings in the present and an army instructor demonstrating how to lift concrete blocks with one's testicles, The Men Who Stare at Goats remains eminently well-written.

Writing isn’t everything however, as McGregor, Clooney, and Co. fail to be anything other than consistently amusing. For a comedy film, being painfully unfunny can be a death knell, but The Men Who Stare at Goats also shows that being consistently funny, never hilarious, can be just as damning. An attempt is made at almost every type of humour around, from lowest common denominator to sight gags to satire, and nothing falls flat; it just fails to elicit anything more than fierce giggling.

If you’re looking for the most dynamic, epic, laugh-out-loud comedy film every made, you won’t find it here. What you’ll find instead is a film that tells a solidly written yarn about a man, a Jedi, and their adventure together, and that’s enough to make it a solid film. It’s a sad state of affairs when a film can be classified as good because it fails to disappoint, but that’s the nature of modern cinema.