George Clooney stars in "The Men Who Stare At Goats."

It’s a war movie and a hippie flick. A paranormal thriller and a black comedy. At the end of the line, it’s apparent that "The Men Who Stare  At Goats" has tried to be a few too many things, but that sloppiness and unpredictability is part of what makes this hodgepodge so much fun.

The film stars a full roster of Hollywood A-listers, and with the arrival of each new familiar face, the plot thickens.

The plot starts with Ewan McGregor as Bob Wilton, a local newspaper reporter in Michigan. He’s been dispatched to do a feature on a man who claims telepathic abilities – able to not only view distant places via a psychic power known as remote viewing but also able to kill people merely by focusing his mind on them. He has a video of a hamster death to prove it.

Bob thinks this guy is nuts – particularly when he claims to have learned the ability in the Army, from a guy named Lyn Cassady. But when Bob’s wife suddenly leaves him and he finds himself plunging into the depths of despair, this human interest writer decides to trek off to Iraq, to show his war reporting chops. Lo and behold, he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) himself, who tells him more about these secret military squads that committed themselves to becoming psychic warriors, dubbing themselves America’s "Jedis."

Through those stories, Bob learns more about Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), the brainchild of this Army squad, who back in Vietnam, and into the 1980s, tried to meld hippie harmony with battlefield tactics, channeling the powers of the earth toward militaristic ends. We meet the motley crew of cadets trying to master this, including Lyn, the star pupil, and Larry (Kevin Spacey), his jealous arch-nemesis. They sit around, smelling flowers and praying to sun gods. There’s a little LSD to boot. It’s free love meets boot camp.

Almost everything that happens through these partially true flashbacks is quite funny. Based on the book by Jon Ronson, the film says at the outset that there’s more truth to this story than many would believe. And the specter of men in fatigues meditating and chanting a daily mantra to their Mother Earth is a hilarious image to envision.

But in the present, as Bob and Lyn trek across the deserts of Iraq during the overthrow of Saddam, things sporadically turn dark. We see the ways in which the private security forces disrupt the lives of everyday Iraqis, how prisoners at American bases are abused. There are IED explosions and firefights where people die. At no point is this juncture of comedy and horror more awkward than when Lyn finds a prisoner of war being blasted by strobe lights, and bombarded by music from the cartoon show "Barney and Friends."

At the screening I attended, a woman giggled at the scene, clearly focusing on the Barney tunes. But I was caught off guard by how closely this scenario paralleled precisely what we’ve read about in the news, in regards to all the extreme interrogation techniques that were used during the Bush era. These things did happen; this isn’t fantasy but reality.

So this distracting tug of war, between the dark realities of war and the absurdities of these psychic commandos, is what ultimately detracts from the film’s comedy and compelling performances. All four leads are in rare form, McGregor going wide-eyed in disbelief, Clooney offering us a psychic who’s a little too loony to take seriously but also a little too powerful in his abilities to dismiss, Spacey sneering whenever Lyn stumbles, and Bridges giving us the ultimate surfer dude who has managed to work his way up the ranks of the enlisted officers.

They are a funny bunch to watch, staring at clouds as they try to break them apart with their kinetic psychic powers, always confident that their mind tricks will help them escape from their wellarmed captors. But when things go serious, director Grant Heslov can’t quite juggle the many emotions coursing through this blackest of black comedies. He loses grip over the tone and tempo of his material, and the result is a muddled ending that’s a little funny, a little sad, and woefully unsatisfying.

E-mail: SnyderReviews@hotmail.com 

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