The Men Who Stare at Goats (George Clooney, Jeff Bridges) : Movie Review

There are plenty of true stories that aren’t stories at all. To be a story, something actually has to happen – which is the big, big problem with The Men Who Stare At Goats.

See, while UK author Jon Ronson was able to write a book about his quest to uncover the crazy psychic warfare experiments conducted by the US Military during the Cold War, when it came time to turn what he uncovered into a film, there wasn’t really a film there.

The experiments themselves were hilarious and extremely strange, ranging from “remote viewing” (being able to “see” locations hundreds of miles away) to walking through walls, turning invisible and killing people with your mind (though it only seems to have worked on a single goat).

Unfortunately for this film, they never really went anywhere.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

So instead we follow a small town journalist (Ewan McGregor) as he tries to prove his worth to himself and his ex-wife by travelling to Iraq at the hight of the war, only to fall in with a former “Jedi” (George Clooney in comedy mode) supposedly re-activated and on some kind of mission.

The flashbacks to the heyday of the military’s flirtation with new age ideas (under the leadership of a hippy Jeff Bridges) are great, but it doesn’t take long to realise there’s no real story going on in the present-day scenes.

The Men Who Stare At Goats isn’t as funny as it thinks it is either (seeing McGregor constantly saying he doesn’t know what a Jedi is gets very stale, very quickly), resulting in a viewing experience best absorbed on free-too-air television.

If you can’t wait that long, simply sit outside the cinema and try to remote view the movie from there – you’ll have about as much fun.

WATCH OUT FOR | RATING : 2.5 / 5

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS
In Australian Cinemas From 4 March 2010