Rating: 5/10

Writer: Peter Straughan
Director: Grant Heslov
Cast: George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges
Studio: Overture Films

NOTE: The cut of the film shown at Fantastic Fest was an unfinished one.

Small town reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) doesn’t have much going for him in his life. His wife has left him for his amputee editor. His writing often takes him to uninteresting places. He is reminded that his life is meaningless on a semi-often basis. That is, until Bob discovers a door to a more exciting life within one of his interviews. On routine assignment, he uncovers a secret faction of the army known as New Earth, made up of soldiers that possess different levels of psychic and paranormal abilities. Abilities like being able to walk through walls, become invisible, and even kill animals by just staring at them (hint hint). Well, supposedly.

Wilton decides to unlock the mysterious door life opens for him and walk through it, taking him to Iraq where, in a moment of fate, he meets one of said super soldiers with superpowers. Enter the mustachioed man’s man Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a multi-level soldier with abilities like telepathy and walking through walls. Again, supposedly. Together Cassady and Wilton embark on a journey through a war torn Iraq, uncovering both their interconnected futures as well as the past of New Earth.

Read on for more!

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS is Coen-esque in its eccentricity, yet does not come along with the depth of a film like BURN AFTER READING. On the exterior, it looks to possess all the similar comedy except, in reality, it is not as funny. In attempts to say something about “the bigger picture,” yet ends up just going back and forth in the existential questions it poses so many times that you get lost in what it’s attempting to say in the first place.

The qualities that are appealing about THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS is as expected. That being the performances. Clooney is top notch as always, especially with the mustache. Oddly enough, he too is channeling his inner Coen, with the Cassady character resembling his own from BURN AFTER READING. Another Coen alumni, Jeff Bridges, the hippie commander of New Earth, is as enjoyable as always channeling what could possibly be a younger, more zen, focused version of The Dude. The usually likable Kevin Spacey is fairly unlikeable in this film. However, this is the purpose of his role and thus it is achieved. McGregor, however, is somewhat disappointing in the film, playing a very two-dimensional version of the multi-dimensional everyman we have all seen him play well in films that don’t involve barnyard animals and staring contests.

For example, look to STAR WARS, which this film happens to have quite a lot of references to. As the soldiers of New Earth are referred to as “jedi” for their mind abilities, a few key scenes of comedy between McGregor and Clooney are present for obvious reasons. But while Wilton asking what a jedi is can be funny one or three times, it quickly becomes just as unfunny when it is frequently used.

Which is the perfect example of just what is wrong with the good, but not great, THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS. It tries so hard to be something that in the end, whatever type of film it was trying to be with whatever message it was trying to say gets lost. In other words, it runs right into the wall instead of going through it.