Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats had the makings of a good movie. The journalist got hold of an interesting strange-but-true subject: the story of the First Earth Battalion, an Army/CIA initiative that, from the ’60s to the ’80s, explored “psychic warfare.” That is, training soldiers to read minds, walk through walls, and stare at hamsters and goats so long and hard they keeled over dead. I can see a documentary in the coming together of the New Age and the New World Order, or, fictionalized, a sci-fi epic. What we have, instead, is a just-for-the-hell-of-it military satire, so shapeless it just sort of flops around for an hour-and-a-half, oblivious to attention spans and entertainment value.

This is the feature directing debut of Grant Heslov, who, with George Clooney, co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay of Good Night, and Good Luck. Clooney co-stars as Lyn Cassady, whose eyebrow-raising tales of being the army’s prized goat whisperer attract flailing reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor). Wilton, whose life and career are in tatters after his wife dumped him for an editor, wants to be embedded in Iraq, but instead winds up entwined with Cassady, who claims to be a member of the “New Earth Army” that is training “warrior monks” to literally brainstorm America’s enemies. But the program’s founder, uber-hippie Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) has gone missing, and the whole agenda is floundering due to petty grievances between the New Earth Army and a rival camp run by rebel psychic Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), who is training his own elite squad. Hooper is wildly envious of Cassady, who is bent on finding his mentor, as Wilton ultimately finds himself. (more…)