Well, at least it’s original.

The latest offering from Grant Heslov (better known for his acting, but now rarely seen unattached to George Clooney’s hip/coattails) is exactly as madcap as it sounds.  Ewan McGregor plays Bob, a cuckolded small-town journalist, who decides to prove his manliness to his estranged wife by heading to the Middle East to become a war correspondent.  (Naturally, the most obvious way to win back your woman is to go to the other side of the world.)  Languishing in Kuwait City with no way to cross the border into Iraq, he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney at his comedic best), who reveals himself to be a military-trained, US-sanctioned Jedi Knight, on a covert mission to rescue his former mentor, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges, clearly having the time of his life wearing full military garb with a long gray French plait).

What follows is something of a cross between a rescue movie, a buddy comedy and a total piss-take of New Age philosophy.  When Django is eventually found, it is in a facility run by Lyn’s former rival, a fellow military recruit by the name of Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey, again proving that nothing he does for the rest of his life will ever be as good as American Beauty.  Even K-Pax.).   Lyn fears that Hooper has delved too deeply into the “dark side” of their “Jedi powers”.  Really, one can’t help but be impressed that this film got made at all, since surely innumerable takes would have been ruined by Obi-Wan McGregor laughing at the dialogue, or possibly everyone laughing at McGregor.

The laughs abound – in fact, if you’re curious about the film at all, it would be worth seeing it soon just so that nobody ruins the jokes for you.  However, while it’s easy to enjoy The Men Who Stare At Goats, it falls a little shy of excellence.  It’s hard to tell whether casting McGregor is a help or hindrance to the film.  While he is indisputably a talent, his performance isn’t so good that one cannot imagine the film without him, which is possibly more thanks to the fact that he is the “straight man” in most of the comedic scenes.  However, a lot of the laughs come from the “inside joke” that he played a Jedi in the recent Star Wars prequels, and after the first hour or so, it starts to seem that the film is relying on this gag a little too much.

The finale of the film is also a little forced.  The showdown that seems inevitable doesn’t quite manifest, and even though this subversion of the traditional narrative structure works in an oddball film like this one, the eventual direction of the film seems a tad abrupt and hollow.

Still, The Men Who Stare At Goats works hard for most of its duration, packing the witticisms, double-speak and New Age tomfoolery into a great little package that gets a lot of laughs.  It’s a terrific film, but falls just shy of the comedy classic that it might have been.