George Clooney’s latest film is an unfocused comedy about weird Army pseudoscientific research. The actual history of military mind control (a topic that Jon Ronson’s original 2004 nonfiction account poked dark fun at) would make for spookier stuff: The US government generously paid its lab technicians to dose unwitting agents with LSD, a study that later led its leader to commit suicide. The movie version, meanwhile, has a trippy smile glued to its face. Clooney’s intense operative is ousted by a skeptical journalist (Ewan McGregor) embedded in Kuwait. Clooney and director Grant Heslov can’t have meant their film to be a total lark; both are vets of the somber Good Night, and Good Luck. Yet if Strangelovian zaniness was their goal, they should have loaded the chamber with some real ammo. In too-brief flashbacks, we’re introduced to a hippy fighting force called the New Earth Army, led by the dude himself, Jeff Bridges, playing a maniacal commando. Away from other soldiers, they hone their superpowers like ‘remote viewing’ (we never hear if any kidnappers are found out) and psychic release on the dance floor; the movie gets some scant mileage from the boneheaded bliss-out of Boston’s ‘More than a Feeling’. It is way too heady to work as the kind of farce it shouldn’t have been in the first place.
Joshua Rothkop