Latest screening: The Men Who Stare At Goats

After Up In The Air here we have that other George Clooney – the daft comedy George that can either hit (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, Intolerable Cruelty – yes, whatever the negatives of that less successful Coen film George wasn’t one of them) and miss (Leatherheads). It should perhaps be noted that daft George has always worked under the assured hands of the Coen Brothers. Oh for their touch here.

The Men Who Stare At Goats is no disaster. It’s probably in an Intolerable Cruelty ballpark in terms of quality, but it feels like it could have been so much better.

There’s fun to be had. There are some dynamite gags and great performances all round but too often it either goes to well too many times on a particular gag, running it into the ground, or just ambles aimlessly along with no purpose and drags.

After a fun start that introduces us to Ewan McGregor’s hapless, hopeless journalist, and the story of a psychic special forces group including Jeff Bridges, Clooney and Kevin Spacey (seen in flashbacks) expanded on during an Iraqi road-trip with Clooney and McGregor you soon realize that the flashbacks are all the meat this story has. The present day stuff is on a road-trip to nowhere.

Clooney is good as always and McGregor holds his own and is game for some very funny Star Wars references – though again these go too far. A couple of references to Jedi warriors raise smiles and McGregor’s quip about a farm boy is gold, but the script goers back to these referential gags time and again and they quickly become tired and irritating.

Oddly Bridges is less than great. He is entertaining enough doing a kind of ‘Dude joins the army’ thing but he isn’t pushed here at all. The Dude in The Big Lebowski was a fully formed character. Bill Django here never feels like he is. I don’t think this is Bridges’ fault. He has clearly been hired to be The Dude in a different setting and he brings it, and he does get laughs – but these are more out of a love of Bridges in general than really from anything he is given to do here. This is best seen in his delivery on a hackneyed joke so old and obvious that you feel like his heart just isn’t in it and it just kind of sits there (it’s in the courtroom scene).

Spacey on the other hand has virtually nothing to do but delivers on every front, mining his brief role for some of the best one-liners in the film. In contrast to Bridges he handles an equally old and obvious gag (in a wedding scene) with such expert timing that he drags freshness kicking and screaming into it. Essentially he is set up as the villain of the piece but he is never given a great villainous role to get his teeth into and this is a shame. A film that had the sense to make more of Spacey (and asked anything of Bridges) would have been 10 times better. Unfortunately the filmmakers seem happy to focus all their attention on Clooney and McGregor. While the two work well together and they give there all their story alone is simply not enough to sustain the picture.

So yet again we are left with a great idea in search of a much better script. The film sadly wastes the usually unfaultable genius of Jeff Bridges and underuses a dynamite form Kevin Spacey. Often fun but ultimately disappointing. I've read that Overture in the US were hoping for awards attention on this but i can't possibly fathom where, there is just nothing here on any level that deserves awards attention.