'Men Who Stare at Goats' lacks focus

I think the real draw of social networking is it lets us pretend to be way cooler than we really are.

On the Internet, it's all shirtless parties; in the dreary analog world, I'm slumped on my couch with Cheez-It crumbs littering my five chest hairs as I agonize whether my fantasy football team can risk starting Steve Slaton when one more fumble will have him riding the Pine Express.

On Twitter, we're fonts of 140-character wit; speak to me in person and you'll get back a Simpsons quote or a five-second pause followed by "That's cool."

-- Local show times, theaters.

So I say bring on the updates about what you had for breakfast! Let loose those 12,000-word whines about working retail! The real-life you will be fascinating by comparison. And if you're advertising a movie instead of yourself, why not make it look awful? A first-rate campaign for a second-rate product only leads to disappointment. Like its second Iraq War setting, The Men Who Stare at Goats sounded a lot more fun than it turned out to be.

After his wife leaves him, small-time journalist Ewan McGregor heads to Iraq to try to be a war correspondent, believing this will prove he's not a milquetoast loser. As he waits at the Kuwaiti border, he runs into George Clooney -- and a much better story than the one he was seeking.

On their journey into Iraq, he learns Clooney is the star soldier in Project Jedi, a long-defunct military program to develop psychic warriors. In the midst of the second Gulf War, Clooney's been reactivated for a secret mission.

The Men Who Stare at Goats has all the ingredients for something special: a bizarre fact-based story; a spectacular cast, including program leader Jeff Bridges in a role that could be the New Age cousin to his iconic dropout in The Big Lebowski; and the hallmark of all timeless art -- rooms full of fainting goats. The only thing that could promise more awe would be if they rode into battle on the backs of neon-striped T-Rexes.

And for a while, director Grant Heslov looks like he may make that promise pay off, jogging through the first act with some big laughs and lots of mystery around the big question: Considering they're only like a quarter our size, is beating up a kid really as much of a crime as beating up an adult?

No wait, that's my screenplay, and don't steal my ideas. Goats is more about that whole "Are psychic powers real?" thing.

It should be, anyway. For a journalist, McGregor doesn't seem all that interested in whether all this psychic business genuinely truly works or was all just a wonky Cold War scheme. Meanwhile, the further Peter Straughan's script descends into McGregor and Clooney's episodic adventure and the details of Project Jedi, the harder it dances around the issue of whether the Jedi are supermen with mind-sabers or just a bunch of kooks with creepy stares.

Then again, none of it's all that focused. Goats is based on a book and seems to suffer from a lingering case of badadaptionitis. While the oddball characters have a lot of life in them (aided by that rad cast), the flashbacks to the Project are a bunch of naked exposition (don't be tricked, for once the word "naked" is a bad thing) and everything that's happening to them in Iraq could be catalogued with the label "incidental things designed to kill time until we finally get around to the relevant parts, i.e. the last 10 minutes."

If there was any significance to all this, it was lost in the translation; for all its hints of something bigger, the story never manifests anything more than a lot of strange people doing things any sane person would consider crazy but maybe they're not crazy because maybe they were on to something after all!

Who knows. The Men Who Stare at Goats is a fast car with no idea why it's on the road.

Grade: B-