The Men Who Stare at Goats wants to be Three Kings for the second Iraq War.  We know this because it stars George Clooney in desert fatigues in what seems to be a Strangelovian comedy of war.  And to be fair, the trailer is pretty hilarious:  Clooney, in full O Brother slapstick mode, takes down a goat with only his eyeballs.  How could this go wrong—you’ve got Jeff Bridges playing what looks to be Colonel Lebowski, Kevin Spacey as the arch villain, and…Ewan McGregor? 

This where the movie goes wrong.  Ewan McGregor plays the naïve reporter who goes to Iraq looking for a story because his wife is sleeping with his editor.  In Kuwait, he somehow runs into Clooney, who knew some guy back in his hometown he interviewed once about the military’s attempt to be the “first superpower to actually have super powers.”  Clooney tells him that this top secret battalion was nicknamed “The Jedi Warriors.”  And he tells this to Ewan McGregor.  Who played OB-Wan Kenobi.  And he explains who the Jedis are.  To Ewan McGregor.  OB-Wan.

And that’s the joke. It’s what’s wrong with the entire movie:  The set-up seems ripe for some sort of anti-establishment genius, like how Three Kings predicted the failure of Iraq War II way back in 1998.  But first time director Grant Heslov (who wrote the screenplay for Clooney’s monochromatic love letter to Edward R. Murrow Good Night, and Good Luck) doesn’t connect the dots the way a sharp satire should. The Men Who Stare at Goats is about torture, or in the very least, the military’s ethically-questionable use of psych ops.  Bridges’  “First Earth Battalion” is some sort of new age, hippie platoon dedicated to winning wars through peace, mostly stemming of his harrowing experiences in Vietnam with poor shooting draftees and LSD.  There’s some funny stuff with FEB’s learning to dance psychedelically wearing fatigues…but the movie does nothing with the premise.

After a decent half hour setup, the movie grinds to a halt, with McGregor and Clooney wandering the desert.  Heslov doesn’t seem to know what he wants to say about torture, so he doesn’t say anything.  Clearly, he thinks torture is bad, and in his depiction of how screwed up the former FEB’ers are, he seems to be arguing that torture is as bad for the torturer as the torturee. Seymour Hersch and others have made the same argument.  But Heslov doesn’t make the connection.  He doesn’t show us how you get from the Vietnam era new age hippie mentality to post 9/11 sadistic Cheneyism.  Maybe Heslov could get there via the Jonah Goldberg Liberal Fascism route (it wouldn’t be unprecedented).  If he had made the point, or any point, the scene where Clooney and Bridges unleashes the goats from a barn might have been the “24” era’s Slim Pickens on the bomb.  But as it stands, this movie cries out for direction from someone like Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking) at the helm.  Watching Christopher Hitchens getting waterboarded is way more entertaining.

 

The Pitch

 

 

 

 

Equals