Men Who Stare at Goats, The
Friday, April 2, 2010 at 7:55AM 
It must be very exciting for someone like filmmaker Grant Heslov (who has paid his dues as an actor on film and television) to finally get his big directorial break with a project like The Men Who Stare at Goats. To have all the pieces in line for success including a cast boasting three Academy Award winning actors (George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey) and an established heartthrob in Ewan McGregor. To meet the challenges of one's labor of love by corralling these celebrity egos into one vision, surviving endless hours in rough desert terrain on locations shoots, overseeing vast sums of money, professionals and state-of-the-art equipment, bringing a unique novel to the big screen and toiling over minute details in the editing room to perfect your work.
It then must be quite disheartening to realize that for all this effort, sweat and lifeblood you've only managed to pass a colossally jumbled, boring turd onto the cinematic plain.
Goats is not an awful film by any means. There are inspired moments throughout which keep you continually anticipating a breakthrough in logic, structure or humor which just never arrives. At best, its quirkiness is its lone redeeming quality. At worst - a massive waste of an interesting idea, acting talent and time (mostly mine).
Briefly, the story focuses on a reporter (McGregor) whose girlfriend has left him for his editor. To combat his broken heart he thrill-seeks by heading off to Iraq to cover the war. There he meets Clooney, an undercover black ops soldier, who was once part of a curiously hippie military experiment in the paranormal called the "New Earth Army" headed up by Jeff Bridges. Clooney has been "recalled" for a mission. McGregor tags along for the scoop.
The film misses too many opportunities in its frustrating slog toward oblivion. McGregor, adequately forcing an American accent, is much too dull for the narrator and straight man journalist at the heart of the story. Has he, outside of Trainspotting, proven any thespian worth whatsoever? He's like Malcolm McDowell with a learning disability. His lack of incredulity and frantic anger over the ridiculous, perilous and purposeless situations that Clooney leads him into leaves the bantering possibilities and comical animosity at the door. It actually would have been funnier (and more politically satirical) had McGregor played a Brit and constantly harped at the American Clooney for immersing him in the U.S. caused mess of Iraq. Yet there is very little satire to this at all. Which is a glaring omission in what is, essentially, a politically leaning army comedy. Bridges phones it in as the anti-establishment spiritual guru of the paranormal unit and Spacey simply sleepwalks through the role of Clooney's ideological rival and professional nemesis. These problems are exacerbated by a script which reads like a nerdy film student (Peter Straughan) trying to impress his professor by seeing how many movie references or takes on famous lines he can cram into ninety pages. A "Jedi" trope is worked in tirelessly due to McGregor's presence. Or maybe it was in there before his casting, in which case it should have been tastefully abandoned.
Goats has identity issues and never really knows what it wants to be when it grows up. It becomes deadly serious at times, weakly allegorical at others, and hints at a certain insider hipness (with a knowing wink and nod) that what we are watching is some clever subversion of the standard Hollywood war picture a la Three Kings, Dr. Strangelove or M*A*S*H.
It isn't.
It drops dead on the way to crashing that USO dance.
Reader Comments (2)
Dearest Adolphus,
You couldn't be more spot on! I kept waiting for this movie to rise above the occasional inspired bit of weirdness, but it never did.
Check out "The Informant," if you haven't already. Oh, and you might like "Ossos," a Portuguese flick from the late 90's that was just released. It's a very spare, uncompromising and striking piece of work. (And by the way, it inspired two sequels, "In Vanda's Room" and "Colossal Youth").
And "Hot Tub Time Machine" rocked.
Ever Yours,
Lance
I'll get them on queue immediately. Think I'll pass on "Hot Tub" though.