Entertainment

Goat cheese

Inspired by previous mustache movies, like Matt Damon in “The Informant!” and Andy Samberg in “Hot Rod,” George Clooney (and Kevin Spacey) gamble that you won’t be able to stop giggling at their precious little ’staches in the inept and shapeless would-be comedy “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

In the early weeks of the Iraq war, a journalist (Ewan McGregor) is stranded in Kuwait, where in a bar he meets a bonkers trash-can salesman named Cassady (Clooney) who mutters dark improbabilities about his prior service in a goofy New Age Army unit. Despite Cassady’s raving, the reporter agrees to drive around the Iraq desert with him looking for fun.

The plot consists of McGregor playing the straight man as Clooney babbles of the weirdness (shown in flashbacks) that was the New Earth Battalion, a fanciful group of soldier-psychics.

“More of this is true than you would believe,” says a caption at the start. You will pardon me if I don’t believe that a Dude-like lieutenant colonel (Jeff Bridges) with a footlong ponytail presided over a secret Army unit that successfully trained soldier-hippies to kill goats with staring, or to hang sandbags from their scrotums with hooks. “We must become the first superpower to develop super powers,” Bridges says.

You are meant to get the impression that a great gonzo Hunter Thompson freakapalooza is exploding all around you. Yet when Clooney says he and his cohorts were like “Jedi,” the payoff is McGregor delivering a Disney Channel-style line: “The Force truly was strong with this one.” (McGregor played a Jedi in three awful movies you have probably forgotten by now.)

Periodically Spacey and his mustache slither into the flashbacks. He’s a sinister sergeant who wants to take over the operation from the Bridges character. Sample laugh line: “Still, he’s the best. Oh, Twizzlers!”

Written by Peter Straughan, who wrote the equally blundering film version of “How To Lose Friends and Alienate People,” this one-joke script wouldn’t have made it out of development boot camp if it hadn’t attracted the interest of Clooney and Grant Heslov, the friend with whom he wrote “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Heslov directs for the first time in a career that, I pray, will consist of one movie.

“I was on a mission even if I didn’t know what kind of mission it was,” McGregor says. I’m with you. If you figure it out, shoot me an e-mail. The movie he’s in has all the sand of “Lawrence of Arabia” but half the laughs and none of the conciseness.

At the end, as I stumbled back onto the street as disoriented and grateful as a released POW, I thought I’d need a calendar to calculate the length of time I’d been away.