Hello gang

Sorry I’ve “gone dark” over the past week and a bit, but work has been tearing me a few new ones, and getting stuck over a computer during my extra, extra valuable free time has just seemed wrong. Which means my apology is somewhat qualified, but an apology nevertheless.

Anyway.

I went to see “The Men Who Stare At Goats” tonight. I had really been looking forward to this one – the trailer looked really cool, and the movie has tremendous star pulling power with George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor filling the lead roles. I knew that it was based on the “true” story of a 1980’s Pentagon-commissioned elite squad of psychic supersoldiers and featured Jeff Bridges as a uniformed hippie. And let’s face it – psychic supersoliders aside, the spectacle of a peace-lovin’, tripped-out Dude should be enough to jack any shithouse flick into arthouse cinema.

Sadly, the film’s enormous potential fails to translate. Most of the quality comedy appears in the trailer, and the remaining laughs are often melancholic at best. Clooney, Bridges and Spacey are unsurprisingly solid, but McGregor’s journalist-protagonist doesn’t quite connect with the material in the way one would hope, and his godawful Yank accent makes the narration a bit of a chore at times. The plot itself is loose and disjointed, with most of the meaty substance relegated to Clooney’s explanatory flashbacks.

The fact that it is the characters themselves that provide the dramatic impetus does, however, mitigate against the movie’s many other shortcomings. There are some genuinely heartfelt intervals that really do succeed in bringing meaning to some otherwise sad and pathetic lives, and whilst it can hardly be called inspirational, “The Men Who Stare At Goats” does manage to deliver the promise of unlimited destiny to each of us. Even if it is a destiny that, by the film’s own admission, is perhaps only ever appreciated and fulfilled in hindsight.

I’d probably wait for DVD with this one. It would still make a good night in.