If you can buy in to the premise, a harmless entertainment: Men Who Stare at Goats

It's not hard to like "The Men Who Stare at Goats," but it takes a lot of buy-in to get there. If you can accept, even in a comedy, that the U.S. Army would hire a Vietnam vet officer who's spent years in the counterculture (doing research, supposedly) to develop and lead a special unit devoted to peace and harmony and new age techniques, able to kill without weaponry (that's the staring at goats part), then maybe you can accept this film for what it is - I couldn't make that buy in, but still appreciated the broad humor of the officer, Jeff Bridges - he's getting better with each movie, isn't he? - having his team of soldiers dance and get high - far, far more humor in these scenes than in most other "trippy" scenes from other movies, e.g., the totally flat Steve Martin & Meryl Street It's Complicated. So the plot is preposterous, but there are some laughs along the way: the loathesome Kevin Spacey going into a snit when his psychic powers fail him, for example. Casting of the film is weird, however. Spacey, Bridge, and Clooney are all way too young if we're to believe that they were Vietnam vets or recruited shortly after the war. Ewen Macgregor, as a reporter trying to cover the Iraq war, is way too old for the part and continually has trouble with his American accent. Filmmakers obviously know nothing about American journalism, by the way. All that said and the premise as ridiculous as it is, the movie goes along at a pretty good clip, with some funny scenes - it has nothing to do with real life and nothing to do with war, but it's a harmless entertainment.