The Men Who Stare at Dolts

Not too much to say about this tiny, ultimately flat Overture feature. Chalk it up as another casualty of the we need a star! mentality that gets Jim Carrey a cool thirty mil just for showing up to set to eat craft services – the entire budget of THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS’ was necessarily devoted to its stars (Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor)…and it shows.

For a movie that takes us all the way from small-town Michigan to secret military facilities deep within Iraq, there is shockingly little scope, grandeur, or visual interest. Even though some of the scripting was downright bad (Clooney kicks McGregor in the balls) the better jokes and offbeat moments could have been great if the filmmakers had the dough to widen the madcap universe of the film. So it’s not a script problem (and the source material, so I hear, is pretty great). Instead, director Grant Heslov is probably at fault for a film that never wants to take itself seriously – yet always demands that we do. It’s a ludicrous request, especially considering the plot which -- resembling THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE on a great deal more LSD – “climaxes” with dozens of goats being liberated from an Area 51-esque research facility while the entire military unit “trips balls.” Heslov and Clooney worked together on GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK to infinite more success, partly because the material had actual substance, partially because Clooney, who directed that film, had a surprisingly sharp aesthetic sense and terse visual language. I wish he had helmed GOATS as well and redistributed some of the film’s funds away from his co-stars and towards the film’s design and tech.

It’s all a shame because I love films that are tiny, throwaway, origami swans – pretty and intriguing even if, in the end, they are merely folded paper. BURN AFTER READING, a film GOATS aspires to be but never comes close, is exactly that way. Nothing’s wrong with popcorn movies—even stupid movies where every character we meet is a bit of a dolt and no one is relatable—but they have to be told well. This simply isn’t, and while watching I was really just impatiently waiting my chance to get the fuck out of there. And I wasn’t the only one, the entire audience I saw this film with sort of shuffled about the theatre with a blank goat-like disinterest, chewing their stale popcorn, already forgetting what happened just before. It's probably for the best.