By Jeremiah Magan
Daily Titan Opinion Editor

This is one of those all-too-common cases of when a film’s trailer shows all the best parts of the film and leave the audience with nothing to be pleasantly surprised by. The Men Who Stare at Goats is a forgettable film. It is entertaining and the story keeps the audience engaged, waiting for something interesting to happen. Unfortunately, if they saw the trailer, there is very little else to see that is worth the cost of admission.

The title of the film is a bit misleading. The film is about a group of men and one of them did stare at a goat, once; but other than that, the film really revolves around the development of a squad of psychic soldiers.

Ewan McGregor plays a small town American journalist in the Middle East looking for a story, something that will give his life meaning and prove that all of his trials and tribulations were worth it in the end. He meets George Clooney’s character, a veteran of the Army’s special forces who claims to have supernatural abilities and a secret mission that he must complete.

Clooney was miscast in his role; the character he plays seems like he should have been more eccentric than he turned out to be. The film suffers because Clooney plays to his personal strengths and not the character’s. His personality is too understated to be convincing as a man who specialized in reaching out with his mind to locate people halfway around the world, walk through walls or strike fear in the hearts of men by staring at them and getting into their heads.

Jeff Bridges is one of the few highlights in the film, playing an unconventional squad leader training his soldiers to use psychic powers as a means of non-violent warfare. The film would have benefited from more flashbacks of Bridges training Clooney and the other members of the U.S. Army’s First New Earth Battalion.

The three lead actors in the film are better than this film allowed them to be, and the film may have been better served using no-name actors who carried no expectations from the audience.