"The Men Who Stare at Goats" makes comedic hay out of an apparently true effort by the U.S. Army to develop psychic super-soldiers who would conquer the enemy with their minds instead of guns. But while Jon Ronson's non-fiction book on the subject is probably quite the page-turner, this satirical screen adaptation veers so wildly in tone and temperament that it rarely delivers as either a comedy or a timely satire.

Ewan McGregor - here, as in "Amelia," struggling to sound flatly American - plays Bob Wilton, an out-of-work reporter from the Midwest who travels to Kuwait in the early days of the second Gulf War in the hopes of being embedded with a combat battalion. Instead, he winds up crossing paths with Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who tells Wilton about his years in a top secret experimental army unit known as the New Earth Army, which trained soldiers to astrally project, break up clouds with their minds and any number of other New Age-y activities that one wouldn't normally associate with the military. (The title refers to a darker exercise, in which the trainees attempted to kill livestock with nothing more than eye contact.)

While Cassady claims to be going to Iraq for commercial reasons, Wilton soon learns that he's trying to find the New Earth Army's founder, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), who appeared to Cassady in a vision. When the two track down Django at a facility being run by Cassady's arch-nemesis, psychic faker Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), "Goats" takes a dark turn that doesn't fit with the movie we've been seeing - it writes a darkly political and satirical check that the screenplay by Peter Straughan ("How to Lose Friends & Alienate People") doesn't have the heft to cash.