The Men Who Stare at Goats

This film had a lot of promise to it. When it was initially released, the trailer made me want to go and check it out, but such is the way of things I never got the chance. I had to wait until I stumbled across the DVD in a charity shop for £2 that I decided I should give it a watch. At face value it looks like it's a good film. The title suggests that it will be quite funny, and the cast suggests that it should be quite impressive. It's not.

I was really disappointed by the film. I can't work out whether it's trying to tell the story of psychic research in World War II seriously or whether it is ridiculing the idea behind it. Either way it doesn't do it very well. If it's trying to seriously tell the story then it comes across as a ridiculous idea, and the characters are dismissed as nothing more than 'hippie soldiers' who only very rarely do anything psychically impressive. However, if they are trying to make light of the research then they don't do this well enough.

Some of the names associated with this film also convey the idea that it should be a very successful film. Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges are all fantastic actors, but when they are put together I didn't think that they worked well. Jeff Bridges does quite well at playing the leader of the New Earth Army, but still comes across as a bit of a lunatic rather than the pioneer of a whole field of military research. Whether the audience is meant to see him as he was perceived at the time seems a little bit irrelevant because there is not instance of him 'coming good' with his psychic powers.

Kevin Spacey has always had my admiration as an actor. American Beauty and Se7en are examples of his fantastic acting, but in this film he just seemed a bit stale. His is brilliant at 'acting deadpan', and he does well at playing the 'bad guy' of the film, but he doesn't work for me. The links between his character and George Clooney's character are portrayed well, but it doesn't seem that jealousy would be part of the personality of a member of this type of army.

Credit where credit is due, George Clooney does well in this film, and is quite refreshing as a comic actor. His timing and tone is very amusing at times, and he works well with Ewan McGregor in the early stages of the film, but his character seems to tail off towards the end of the film, and I think this is a bit of a shame. I also enjoyed seeing Ewan McGregor in this film, but his character was very boring. His motivation to go to Iraq was to prove to his wife that he was a man. This seems a bit extreme, because upon finding out that my wife was cheating of my with my boss I don't think I would prove my masculinity to her in an attempt to win her back.

Another source of disappointment with this film was the scriptwriting. There were some genuinely funny moments, but on the whole, The Men Who Stare at Goats was just not as funny as I thought it would be. I think this might just be another example of a very successful book that was made into a film, but wasn't made very well. And this is a shame, because it had the potential to be a hilarious, yet interesting film about the use of psychic research during the War.