The Men Who Stare at Goats: Critic Reviews

An absurd comedy that borders on genius

The Men Who Stare at Goats is a magical-realist sitcom war farce that ends up being about nothing but its own slovenly smugness.

A likable, lightweight, absurdist comedy.

If we can't be sure how much is just being made up, then we have to rely on the entertainment factor, and that is marginal.

This is the anti-Hurt Locker experience: Where that Iraq War film was absorbing and deadly serious, The Men Who Stare at Goats is irreverent and lighthearted.

The sense of emotional detachment keeps things feeling smooth and low-key, but, as is clear in the film's last few scenes, the playful tone shades into the simply trivial, which in the setting doesn't quite play.

You can't make this stuff up, but you can botch the telling of it, and that's what sinks this satiric drama based loosely on a 2004 nonfiction book by London-based journalist Jon Ronson.

What's mildly exasperating is that there is an actual quest involved: The Men Who Stare at Goats goes out to the desert in search of its tone-and never finds it.

The narrative flips and flops ruin the comedic flow.

You may wonder if this screen version of the book of the same name is as unfunny and strangely mushy as it seems, but trust your instincts.

It seems too much a privilege to be chuckling in the theater about psychic warfare while the unfunny business of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan continues.

Caution: Staring at 'The Men Who Stare at Goats' may result in your falling down laughing, courtesy of a devilishly smart script, subversive japery and a flawlessly funny cast.

Clooney gives it everything, but what does he get in return? A void where the story is meant to be.

It actually doesn't matter if the book is truthful. It doesn't claim the paranormal powers are real. Ronson simply says some officials thought they might be -- and that if they were, we had to get there first. The movie is funny either way.

Clooney and Bridges model an assortment of wigs and facial hair as they labor to put across their outsize characters.

The Men Who Stare at Goats has a glorious good time satirizing the extravagant lengths to which the military and intelligence establishments will go if they think there's a payoff at the other end.

The yarn unravels without ever identifying its satirical targets. Is it a lampoon of peace-and-love mysticism? A critique of militant war-for-profit privateers? Ultimately, it's a shapeless wad of goat cheese.

This is grizzled, wild-eyed Clooney, not the suave sophisticate, and it's a nice change of pace.

For a movie that searches constantly for a consistent feel, sometimes within the same scene, The Men Who Stare at Goats is remarkably entertaining.

Intended as a farcical antidote to big-screen bores about Afghanistan and Iraq, it's twice as pompous and endlessly tedious.

A serendipitous marriage of talent in which all hearts seem to beat as one.

Heslov directs for the first time in a career that, I pray, will consist of one movie.

It's broad and yet realistic, silly and yet never exhuberantly goofy.

The picture lacks discipline and focus at times, but it's fun despite the chaos, although a wandering-in-the-desert scene goes on far too long.