Fridae

Quite a fitting movie for an April Fool’s release, Men who stare at goats is a comic adaptation of a book chronicling the US Army’s paranormal research projects during the Cold War. The script feels like it came out of one of those party games where participants take turns telling a story and making it more absurd as it continues, without losing any coherence.

It’s a game where George Clooney makes as many Jedi warrior references as possible to Ewan McGregor, where Jeff Bridges reprises his Dude character from The Big Lebowski – but as a Viet veteran, and where Kevin Spacey takes the role of the manipulative prick. In other words, you’d really need to be in need of laughs for this film to work.

Ewan McGregor plays a reporter who stumbles upon the history of the US Army’s paranormal research and top secret psychic commando training programme, dismisses it, then meets its top graduate (George Clooney, channelling 1950s action movie stars) during GW Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. And in their journey across its dessert, we meet Bridges and Spacey in a series of hilarious flashbacks that reveal the loopey training programme for the psychic commandos.

In all seriousness, this film has a Saturday Night Live feel that comes from its knitting together of various comic scenarios. The humour doesn’t fail, the scenarios are entertaining, but the film lacks a clear direction and purpose.

In a way, Men who stare at goats is the project that the Coen brothers should have helmed and written, given their ability to make an existential comedy out of the most farcial collection of coincidences. In terms of absurdist comedies, this ranks somewhere in between Dean Spanley and Burn After Reading. You’ll really have to be in the right mood for this.