MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS, THE - DVD review

I could tell you about this movie . . . but then I'd have to kill you.

That's the general tone of "The Men Who Stare at Goats," scripted by Peter Straughan and directed by Grant Heslov in a style that would make the Coen Brothers proud. And there's nobody better to pull off that kind of deadpan and dark humor than George Clooney, who has as much fun with this one as he did "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

But he doesn't have the market cornered. Jeff Bridges also tries hard not to giggle as the tofu-and-granola peacenik born-again who's commissioned by the U.S. Army to create The New Earth Army, a cadre of "warrior monks" with super powers called (giggle) "Jedi." Even Kevin Spacey tries to get in on the tongue-and-cheek action as Clooney's chief competitor in the psychic powers department, a Sith-at-heart in the midst of all these Jedi-wannabes in khaki and camouflage.

The funny thing is, "Goats" is loosely based on a book by Jon Ronson, and it turns out there really was a top-secret U.S. Army outfit called the First Earth Battalion which, in 1979, was supposed to create a class of warrior monks who could do mind-bending things. Or at least they tried to learn how to do mind-bending things. There apparently was a real general who, like the one we see at the film's outset, seems determined to go through a wall. Mind over matter, and all that. But of course he simply keeps inflicting pain on himself, so the running joke in real life becomes a running gag in the film.

We get the tour and whole story courtesy of Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a reporter from an Ann Arbor paper who impulsively decides to go to war. Why? Because his job has turned to fluff, where he's relegated to interviewing nut-jobs like Gus Lacey--a guy who claimed to have psychic abilities. What's worse, his wife left him for his editor. So he goes to Kuwait hoping to become a hot-shot war correspondent, only to learn that the embedded correspondents are a tightly knit group . . . and he's on the outside, unable to get in. He can't even get across the border into Iraq. But all that changes when he meets a guy whose name Gus Lacey had mentioned, the guy Lacey said was the psychic leader of them all: Lyn Cassady (Clooney).

Faster than you can say "nut case" he's hopping aboard as Clooney's ride-along, with the two of them traveling across the border clandestinely--meaning, illegally. But the ride and the isolation gives Bob the chance to do his reporter thing and ask probing questions. Those lead to a series of flashbacks that go back to 1980, when a former Vietnam veteran named Bill Django (Bridges) somehow conned the Army into funding his project to create a paranormal unit. Early scenes show Django handing out flowers to hardened, skeptical soldiers and talking to them about the powers of the mind. Basically, you can do anything as long as you think it's possible, and his training involved a complete mindset overhaul. Cassady emerged as the wunderkind of the class, out-dueling rival Hooper (Spacey) in a psychic contest and even rising to the challenge when the Army asked him to use his mental ability to stop the heart of a goat--hence the book's and the film's title.

The jokes run the full gamut. There are fun allusions, as when Django tells his Army recruits that this program will make them "Be all that you can be"--a real Army recruiting slogan. Everyone has a little fun with the whole Jedi bit, too, with Bob saying he'd never heard of Jedi (when, of course, McGregor played one in the "Star Wars" series). Most of the gags are subtle. The most slapstick they get is when the general slams into a wall, or when Cassady tries to show Bob a handy little weapon . . . and injures him many times over, during the demonstration, with Clooney maintaining his deadpan all the while. Since they work with "de-bleated goats," there's a "Silence of the Goats" joke--probably the biggest groaner. But what makes the jokes work is Clooney's slightly crazed, deadly-serious deadpan and McGregor's mastery of the naïve-but-earnest victim.

Another thing that makes this film work is the narrative, which shifts gears between flashbacks and the present mess that Cassady gets them in: kidnapped by criminals, then getting caught up in a gun-shooting feud between rival civilian companies profiting off the war, and eventually the filmmakers bring the flashback plot and current narrative together. The plot itself is almost as tonally tongue-in-cheek as the gags, and so the bottom line with "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is that if you expect more than understated humor and action, you're going to be disappointed.

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" is rated R for language, some drug content, and brief nudity.

Video:
For a DVD, the video presentation is quite good. Yes, there's a thin layer of grain throughout, but the level of detail in close-ups sis superb and the colors and skin-tones are extremely natural. Instead of Kuwait, this was filmed largely in New Mexico, and even in drab or desert scenes the colors hold well and aren't washed out by the harsh exterior light. "Goats" is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen.

Audio:
The audio is a standard Dolby Digital 5.1 that's enough to deliver the ambient sound that makes the film come alive. Dialogue is prioritized because this is a talky film, but the audio is clear and distortion-free.

Extras:
The bonus features are only so-so. Best among them is "Goats Declassified: The Real Men of the First Earth Battalion," which is a lot of fun to watch, especially after seeing the film. You quickly realize how spot-on the film was--and when I say quickly, I mean after 12 minutes, because that's only how long this feature is. Even shorter is "A Classified Report from the Set," which is so darned classified they could only spare seven minutes to do a standard behind-the-scenes featurette with cast and crew talking about the movie.

Heslov checks in for a full-length commentary, but there are a lot of silences and plenty of places where he really doesn't have much to say. It's a below-average commentary track, for sure. Better is the track from writer Jon Ronson. Though it's low-key and there are still some silences here too, the "this was real" revelations and comments about inspirations for the characters are fun to hear. Rounding out the bonus features are four minutes of deleted scenes and four "character bios"--trailers, really, that focus on the four star characters.

Bottom Line:
"The Men Who Stare at Goats" isn't a riotous comedy, and it doesn't have the black comedy message and classic aura of a film like "Dr. Strangelove." But it comes from the same comedic family, and as a tongue-in-cheek slice-of-weirdness film it's entertaining enough. And Clooney and McGregor really make a good road-trip comedy team.