'Goats' tells bizarre tale of Army mind control

"The Men Who Stare At Goats" is the latest Hollywood look-in on the Iraq war and, well, it's not "The Hurt Locker."

In fact, it's not the least bit interested in capturing any kind of boots-on-the-ground reality, and I guess the title is your first clue.

"Goats" wants to be more of a contemporary "Catch 22" - a sardonic take on the madness of war, and of the operation Iraqi Freedom in particular.

To that end, it purports to tell the history of a secret U.S. Army initiative, dating to Vietnam, to train and deploy a squad of psychic soldiers to conquer the enemy through mind-control (they train by staring at goats and stopping their hearts, hence the obscure title and the TV commercials).

"Goats," though, has no idea where this story should begin or how it should be told. Writer-director Grant Heslov tries to tell it from the point of view of a freelance war correspondent (Ewan McGregor) whose dead-end investigation of the rumored Army psychic-soldier squad is suddenly revived when he meets a so-called "Jedi" (George Clooney) at a hotel bar in Kuwait - the kind of cosmic coincidence the movie eventually plays for laughs.

The two have picaresque, fog-of-war adventures in the early confused days of the war, peppered with flashbacks as Clooney's character explains the absurd "history" of the Army's psychic warrior program.

The highlight of these scenes is Jeff Bridges, the New Age founder of the New Earth Army, a hippie Patton who sports a ponytail and bathrobe and vows to train soldiers to conquer the world with peace.

It's a riff on Jeff Lebowski, and we're reminded that both he and Clooney have done some of their best comic work for the Coen Brothers.

But this isn't the work of the Coens. This is the work of Heslov, who fumbles the movie's main conceit - that the psychic warrior campaign is just as delusional as the Bush administration's vision of an easily pacified Iraq.

Heslov tries to hammer it home with a big acid-trip comedy climax (dude, we put acid in the eggs!) that links tortured Iraqi prisoners with New Earth Army's herd of practice goats, but the movie is so confused even that reference is likely to sail over the heads of befuddled viewers.

It's not until a voice-over epilogue - Heslov's desperate Cliff Notes - that you realize what the movie was meant to be about.

Beyond that, it's mostly about a chance to see Clooney in agreeable goofball mode. The movie is forgettable, but his demonstration of the psychic-warrior's "sparkly eyes" technique is destined for his appreciation reel.