The All-Seeing Eye

The hardest thing to review is mediocre films because there's nothing to say about them. They don't excel and they don't fail. They just exist. An interesting premise is rarely squandered by a mediocre film, it's just not given an especially good treatment. It's a victim of filmmaking by committee that waters it down, or maybe a creative group that whose brains were homogenized (with a blender) to keep them from coming up with an exit strategy for Iraq.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is one of the most perfectly mediocre films of the year. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it. It occupied an hour and a half of my time and then I went home. I laughed at a handful of parts, but no scene struck me as particularly unnecessary. It almost defies analysis just by being so damn inoffensive.

The tale The Men Who Stare at Goats weaves is that of a reporter, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor at his blandest and most mediocre) who is following alleged psychic soldier Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) en route to a black ops mission. Along the way we frequently cut to Lyn's past in a secret government training facility where a man named Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) taught them to fight with their minds using New Age techniques.

One of the simplest mistakes it makes is that it goes from meandering and plotless (it's a roadtrip movie for the majority of its running time) to an anti-war parable with the heroes saving prisoners from a villain that seems like a little third-act studio revision. Trying to change your narrative style mid-film is such a rookie mistake, and while this is Grant Heslov's first film as a director, he was responsible for the pretty great screenplay for Good Night and Good Luck.

The second is that Ewan McGregor's entire character needed to be excised from the screenplay. He's not just useless, he's detrimental to the impact of the film. Having a cipher for our skepticism rarely works in a movie like this, and here Bob Wilton is the peak upon which we sit to view these characters in action. We never get deep into the absurd rivalries of these loopy, eccentric character because we're viewing it all through Bob Wilton's rolling eyes. It's like we're being told every few seconds not to forget that these characters are clownshit, but the drama and the comedy would have been more effective if we had started sympathizing and relating to the characters, instead of relating to them in a "look at how stupid they are, and the poor fellas don't realize it" sort of way. Yeah, these guys are as crazy as that Bill O'Reilly-Ann Coulter-Glenn Beck Cerberus I keep drawing subconsciously, but the whole film is akin to reading an article rather than watching a film.

That's not to say that the film doesn't work occasionally, it's just that it putters through the portions that don't work, as if it was written on a scene-by-scene basis and then the remaining scenes were written to connect the good ones together. The best portions of the film are when Bob's (and our) skepticism begins to melt and we begin to wonder if Lyn really is crazy or if he does have some psychic powers because, as I stated above, these are the parts where our skepticism doesn't get in the way of our relating to the characters and participating in the drama (and drama being the essence of comedy--by extension, the comedy).

Heslov strikes me as a man who never intended to be a director, but rather to be a writer (he was an actor before he was a writer, I believe). If I were to speculate (which I always do), I would say he accepted the directing job because he perhaps had a difficult time in the trenches as a writer on Good Night and Good Luck and decided that the best way to gain more control over future projects was to at least have some experience directing, if not direct those future projects himself.

Furthermore, he was guaranteed a huge star (with barely a hit to his name--isn't 21st century movie stardom so strange?) in George Clooney which would surely get his project greenlit and he's guaranteed a tidy little sum which will help him get future projects produced. Good for him. I can only hope those future projects are more along the lines of Good Night and Good Luck, though.

So as I said before, there really isn't much to be said about this film. It works sometimes, it has some good gags, but it's not really worth seeing in theaters. I will say that I do believe this film is based on true events, because it's a touch easier to believe than this.

5/10