The PhilmGuy Reviews 'The Men Who Stare at Goats'

Nazis and Soviets aren’t the only armies that got to dabble in crazy psychokinesis experiments. Apparently the U.S. Army explored supernatural battle techniques in the 1980s in a top-secret program that tried to build super-soldiers who could divine the location of captured troops, become invisible, walk through walls and make animals keel over just by staring at them.

The way director Grant Heslov tells the story in The Men Who Stare at Goats, the program — dubbed the First Earth Battalion — was an ill-conceived joke, with bizarre elements of tantalizing promise sprinkled throughout. So Heslov runs with the silly themes and turns the film into a deadpan comedy, mocking the concept of psychic soldiers even as it coaxes you into believing that George Clooney can stop a goat’s heart with his penetrating glare.

Continuing his comedy kick (Leatherheads, Burn After Reading), Clooney sells his character — a former member of the Battalion now serving as a government contractor, who tells his story to a journalist (Ewan McGregor) he meets in Kuwait — by keeping the self-aware mugging to a minimum and spitting out self-deluded lines with a straight face. He makes you laugh both at and with his character as he eludes terrorist capture, gets marooned in the desert and crashes his car while attempting to separate clouds with his mind.

McGregor, who only shrinks under Clooney’s overpowering comic glow, is a game straight man who handles his half of the befuddled banter with ease, and Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey ham it up masterfully as Clooney’s former psychic brothers in arms.

Peter Straughan’s peppy, Star Wars-reference laden script matches Clooney’s star power, but the plot goes a bit too far off the rails at the end, with a groaner finale that makes you want to stare at the screen and try for some spontaneous combustion action.