The Hawkeye

Issue date: 11/11/09 Section: Freestyle

For a movie with such a provocative title, you'd hope for a smart story with kooky enough characters to match it. The film was directed by Grant Heslov, a side-character actor from movies like Leatherheads and Enemy of the State who'd previously penned the screenplay for the terrific Good Night, and Good Luck.
Accordingly, what we have in The Men Who Stare at Goats becomes little more than an actor's movie with famous actors in it.

Here's your list of actors and the corresponding faults with the film:
George Clooney hams it up as a long-haired psychic, Lyn Cassady, without the hilarity of his previous roles in O Brother, Where Art Thou? or even Three Kings (which drew much more humor from the Iraq scene than what's here).

Lyn's character seems poised as the film's heart, but when the film has no discernable plot-there's a mission that's never explained, there's a disconnect between what powers are real and what's not that leads to jarring discrepancies.

Jeff Bridges plays hippie Bill Django, bringing hookers and drugs to the military in hopes of saving the world through the psychic powers of the New Earth Army. The concept becomes trite on its own, but it's overplayed in the movie, when laughs turn to bored stares.

Bell-bottomed people dancing in the green, doing drugs and praying for peace from Mother Earth has no laugh value anymore.
Ewan McGregor plays journalist, Bob Wilton, who follows Lyn around Iraq, hoping to draw a story out of the Army's "super soldiers," but he's mostly there to supply the film with some tongue-in-cheek humor regarding Jedis and Star Wars, an actor's inside joke that falls flat after the enth time.
Between inconsistent voiceover narration and his character's involvement in cliché situations like the wife who leaves him for his boss or not learning to be a hero when taken captive by criminals, Bob has little to nothing of a character arc. Neither does anyone else.

Kevin Spacey, like the rest of the actors mentioned, doesn't do anything we haven't seen before as the spiteful Larry Hooper. Actually, his performance has nothing new in comparison to his own resume. As Larry, he tests LSD on a fellow soldier, and then blames his superiors when the soldier commits suicide.

Later, when a whole base of soldiers experience the effects of LSD, it's a despicably na've representation of acid tripping. Larry laughs at beetles, and everyone else dances and sings.

The earlier scene with the soldier bears more accuracy, and this later scene proves not only the film's careless notions of consistent, realistic storytelling, but also a larger incapacity to portray love or achieve redemption. In this movie, it's only accomplished through LSD.

Robert Patrick plays the tiny role of Todd Nixon, a US government agent who tells Bob how he intends to bring corporate America to Iraq while two independent security (mercenary) teams shoot each other in the streets.

Stephen Lang plays Brigadier General Dean Hopgood, the film's most genuinely convincing goof of a character (borrowing from a slapstick variety), but among the rest of this film, it's less than remarkable.

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