While containing some absurdist laughs, calling Grant Heslov’s wildly unfocused and patched-together, “Men Who Stare At Goats,” uneven is even giving it too much credit, suggesting that the trifle of a picture has real highlights to speak of.
Driven by a lazy, flashback-like narrative — which is largely abandoned and them brought back sporadically — the dull-eyed ‘Goats’ contains scant comedic value and it’s almost amazing to witness the unfunny gags go over like lead. It’s also a meandering, poorly-written film to say the least.
Ewan McGregor (awkward-to-terrible American accent, marginal acting) plays an ineffectual newspaper writer whose life is — cough, predictable — dramatically changed when his wife leaves him for his one-armed editor (the opening employing a horrible singy-songy narration to boot).
Depressed, despondent and trying to find value in his life, he travels to Iraq after shock and awe in hopes of finding a meaningful story on the frontlines that will give him purpose. But months before he left he interviewed some quack psychic (Stephen Root) who talked about some paranormal unit in the military that the journalist dismissed. File that away with, so?
But while in Kuwait, awaiting passage to Iraq, he randomly makes the acquittance of a Lynn Collins (muggy George Clooney, though not quite as broadly farcical as we’ve seen in the past), who is the exact super soldier this fruitcake psychogenic mentioned months earlier. After a brief altercation, Clooney’s Collins believes the universe has fatefully brought them together and soon the idiot duo are traversing the deserts of Iraq on a secret mission which is eventually revealed to be the rescue mission of Clooney’s mentor Larry Hooper (Jeff Bridges) — the hippie-like Dude creator of the New Earth Army (the quacked-out paranormal unit that astoundingly provides so few chuckles). It’s a comedy of errors lacking anything remotely resembling sharp wit and contains mostly cheap, slapstick-y like humor.
During their black ops “mission” — subsequently exposed as the retired Clooney traveling rogue on a psychic hunch or vision — the history of the New Earth army and all its players (including the bratty, power-hungry one-note villain that is Kevin Spacey) is eventually presented. In theory, a new-agey wing of the military that focuses on spirituality, dancing, LSD trips, pseudo-science, running through walls, invisibility, and killing goats by staring at them is amusing, but this tedious run down of events isn’t especially involving or even interesting.
There’s just nothing to cling to in ‘Goats.’ It isn’t particular clever, engaging, or as satirical as it would hope to be. But it’s not as if it comes across as smug or assured either. It’s a collection of half-heated scenes stitched together to form a very basic narrative and it’s largely forgettable.
Obviously, we’re at a bit of a loss of saying anything substantial here, because, there’s nothing substantial in the picture. However, claiming the film is Coen Brothers-lite is an insult to the Coens as it has zero traces of that speedy, acerbic wit. There’s some good use of classic rock in the film, Boston’s “More Than A Feeling,” which you’ve heard in the trailer and other Nuggets-era rock we can’t recall offhand, but really, so what. Also Rolfe Kent’s score is near odious and this guy has made a few musical offenses this year (see the first half of “Up In The Air“).
One thing’s for sure too, we’ve hoped, prayed and rooted for him to give another stand-out performance, but we’ve officially given up on Ewan McGregor as an actor now. The man is just impotent wood for the most part. Either that or we need to just manage the expectation that he’s anything above passable and average. [D+]