Watts.

Put a staggering accomplishment called The Impossible, from Spanish director J. A. Bayona, at the top of the season’s must-see list. This intense nerve-shredder about a vacationing family separated in the violent and unexpected Indian Ocean tsunami that struck the southeast coast of Asia on Dec. 26, 2004, is the most wrenching disaster movie in decades. It’s also true, brilliantly acted by a gifted and dedicated cast and one of the best films about physical and emotional survival ever made. I first saw it at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and I still haven’t recovered. The outline is deceptively simple: an everyday family (Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and their three children) flies to Thailand to spend Christmas vacation in a comfortable resort villa with an ocean view in Khao Lak. They check in, unpack, share a Christmas dinner, open presents and slip into their bathing suits to go snorkeling in water as colorful and adventurous as the guidebooks promised. Then, on the morning after Christmas, the electricity fails, followed by the odd sound of a distant rumble. It increases to a roar, but there’s no plane overhead. For dozens of vacationing Westerners relaxing by the pool, there’s no time to fully comprehend what’s happening before the tsunami is upon them, rising from the sea in a screaming wall of water as forceful as Niagara Falls. Filmed with 3D sound, the destruction of paradise by 98-foot-high waves (not recycled newsreel footage), which lasts 10 minutes, is terrifying, as children are knocked unconscious by flying automobiles and left to float away in the detritus of uprooted palm trees and falling power lines. But the aftermath is even more harrowing, as distraught parents search frantically for lost children and hysterical children wander through the rubble looking for missing parents. Mr. Bayona, the exciting young director who turned the stylishly creepy 2007 ghost story The Orphanage into one of the highest-grossing Spanish films of all time, makes the chaos and carnage of the tidal wave as visceral and overwhelming as anything in The Rains Came, Green Dolphin Street, The Hurricane or Earthquake. Rarely have I seen so much massive destruction staged so effectively. But after the bravura effects end, the human elements begin, and raw emotions take over as families pray for reunion among the overcrowded emergency rooms and unidentified corpses. Based on the actual experiences of tsunami survivors Maria and Henry Belon and their children, the nuanced screenplay by Sergio Sanchez gets everything right. Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, in two of the most rewarding roles of their careers, turn The Impossible into a life-affirming experience.

As the distressed British-born businessman father working for a firm in Japan, broken and bloody, clinging to two younger sons and praying that the rest of his family is still alive, Ewan McGregor has never been more appealing or more vulnerable. As his noble, heroic doctor wife instinctively trying to help others despite her own injuries, Naomi Watts gets a punishing workout. Climbing trees with two displaced children in her arms, swimming to safety through dead fish and rotting cadavers while her oldest son stays by her side on their agonizing journey through the ruins to a makeshift hospital, Ms. Watts seems almost spiritually committed to her role. The children are wonderful, especially a compelling young actor named Tom Holland, who makes an impressive debut as the brave, heartbreaking boy forced to shoulder responsibilities beyond his age and comprehension as he tries to save his mother’s life in the absence of a father. The entire cast achieves monumental heights of honesty and integrity in an unforgettable film that combines epic spectacle with the intimacy of loving relationships in a celebration of the invincible human spirit.

rreed@observer.com

THE IMPOSSIBLE

Running Time 107 minutes

Written by Sergio G. Sánchez

Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona

Starring Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland

The premise is wickedly, delightfully preposterous: An amiable billionaire sheik (Amr Waked), who has a passion for salmon fishing whenever he visits his estate in the ruggedly gorgeous highlands of Scotland, is convinced the sport creates a spiritual connection between people and nature. Determined to introduce it to his subjects in the parched desert of Yemen as a beneficial gesture of peace, he hires a beautiful, stuffy business representative and investment consultant in London named Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) to implement his crazy scheme. First, she goes to an uptight, anal-retentive academic buffoon from the Royal Department of Fisheries who walks into glass walls, Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) and declares Yemen too hot to accommodate salmon, dismissing the project as a waste of time. But Harriet is a determined little crumpet who appeals to the British prime minister’s PR adviser, Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas, in a ballsy, scene-stealing performance as a chain-smoking harridan who makes grown men shake and regimes collapse). Ever the apple-polishing opportunist on the lookout for front-page news to make the British government look heroic, Maxwell sees salmon fishing as a coup to soften Arab-Euro relations, and endorses the idea enthusiastically. With Harriet’s sexy charisma and the sheik’s offer of $80 million, Dr. Jones gives in, outlining a plan to construct a dam and export 10,000 British salmon to the desert from the North Sea to establish hatcheries. The big tension is getting farm salmon to swim upstream and create a new fishing industry in what was once a dry river bed. The salmon offer massive resistance, and so do the sheik’s military opponents, a gang of Muslim terrorists who threaten him with treason for insulting their ancient customs with new-fangled Western ways. As the obstacles increase and tensions multiply, so do the feelings of Dr. Jones and Miss Chetwode-Talbot, two lonely, unfulfilled Brits who are forced to rethink their positions on fishing and reconsider the possibility of romance. Her soldier boyfriend has been reported missing in action. His wife has deserted him and their stagnant marriage for a job in Geneva. Together they gain a new priority for life and love as he changes from a dull, humorless government puppet into a forceful lover and she overcomes her bureaucratic rigidity to find her inner beauty as a desirable woman. Mr. McGregor may seem miscast in his Henry Higgins cardigan sweaters and preppie haircut, even wearing pajamas during sex (nothing short of revolutionary for him)—but he has never looked healthier and handsomer, or acted with more appealing comic looseness. Ms. Blunt is funny, adorable and endearing. Their chemistry as costars is so obvious that their eventual move from business to bedroom is as welcome as it is inevitable. And the always estimable Ms. Scott Thomas—cold, marble-hard and hilarious—steals every scene, even when she’s offscreen, sending scorched emails with sarcastic instant-cartoon messages.

Initially, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, based on a book by Paul Torday that viciously parodied the lunacy of British foreign policies in the Middle East, ended with the British prime minister buried at the bottom of the Red Sea. Mr. Hallström, a director who favors happy endings, diplomatically softened the book’s political comic bluntness, but the screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, who wrote The Full Monty and Slumdog Millionaire, keeps the barbs sharp enough to sustain interest. The question persists: Who wants to see a movie about salmon fishing? But it’s a spirited, eloquent film—delightfully offbeat, deliciously different and well worth investigating.

rreed@observer.com

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN

Running Time 112 minutes

Written by Simon Beaufoy (screenplay) and Paul Torday (novel)

Directed by Lasse Hallström

Starring Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt and Amr Waked

Green and McGregor.

You sense an instant prognosis of pretentiousness with the opening words of soundtrack narration in a horror called Perfect Sense: “There is darkness. And there is light. There are men and there are women. There is fruit. There are restaurants. Disease. There is work. Traffic.” And there is Ewan McGregor, who makes entirely too many movies and only occasionally makes an effort to speak the kind of English anyone can understand.

There is also an epidemic sweeping Scotland that leaves its victims unable to smell—a mysterious virus spreading grief and fits of sobbing. Mr. McGregor is Michael, a scruffy Glasgow chef who falls for Susan (played by professional sexpot Eva Green), a neurotic epidemiologist whose apartment overlooks the alley behind his restaurant where he goes to chain smoke endless unfiltered cigarettes. The plague spreads throughout the world, but these two seem oblivious to the calamity going on around them. Instead, this loopy couple indulges in binges of sex, giving the two stars ample opportunity to cavort around in the buff, which both of them have had plenty of experience doing in other films. Cut from the same bolt of plague-genre sci-fi fabric as François Mireille’s Blindness and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, it’s another yawn in a line of cautionary tales designed to scare the living daylights out of us every time we sip a glass of tap water. Nothing is ever explained about the cause or origin of the deadly disease, which is called S.O.S. (sensory olfactory syndrome) because it begins with the nose before it eventually destroys all five senses. The pestilence goes global, spreading chaos, rage, hate and violence; the streets become battlegrounds and turn into vacant lots of abandoned cars (all relayed on TV news footage). By the time it attacks the taste buds, people go crazy with hunger and start devouring everything from raw animals to tubes of lipstick. If the customers can no longer tell the difference between lamb chops and Ajax, you can imagine the toll this takes on the restaurant business. As food becomes a distant memory, life goes on, making way for new sensations. Michael’s job goes down the drain, but not to worry. The lovers just get naked again, retire to the bathtub and eat the soap. Deafness is next and the screen goes silent (not nearly as much fun as The Artist). By the time blindness set in, I had beaten them to the punch and stopped watching already.

Directed by David MacKenzie, who has an obsession with Mr. McGregor’s wee-wee (showing it off even more in the bleak, disastrous, 2003 river-barge thriller About Adam), this film is about the end of the world by ecological apocalypse, but neither Mr. MacKenzie’s plodding direction nor the ropey screenplay by someone named Kim Fupz Aakeson (I defy you to say that one 10 times in a row without getting acid reflux) manages to shed any fresh insight or provide an original point of view. It’s so vague that you rarely see Eva Green’s lab, and although Ewan McGregor is occasionally shown reducing a sauce or basting a chicken, he could just as well be a garage mechanic. If you crave action, dialogue, explanations, character revelations and clear plot resolutions, Perfect Sense never lives up to its title.

rreed@observer.com

PERFECT SENSE

Running Time 92 minutes

Written by Kim Fupz Aakeson

Directed by David Mackenzie

Starring Ewan McGregor, Eva Green and Connie Nielsen

1/4

Carano. (Claudette Barius/Five Continents Imports, LLC)

Just what we need — another violent comic-book fantasy about another covert government operative (a catch-phrase that describes just about everybody in escapist-action franchise movies from incoherent Tom Cruise Mission Impossible flicks to Jason Bourne cinematic Xeroxes with Matt Damon). This one is called Haywire. The only difference is that this time the battering ram doing all the kickboxing, slicing and killing is a woman, more or less played, since she cannot act, by kung fu expert, karate specialist, martial arts star and Angelina Jolie wannabe Gina Carano. She’s a female boxer who was defeated in 2009 by Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos in the Strikeforce Women’s Championship, whatever that is. The men she beats the crap out of are an all-star bevy of camera-ready hunks baring their pecs in faceless roles to sell tickets. They are wasting their time, but, boy, do we need them. It is doubtful that the box-office flame exuded by Ms. Carano on her own could draw moths.

Haywire makes no sense whatsoever, which should come as no surprise. It’s the latest brainless exercise in self-indulgence from Steven Soderbergh, whose films rarely make any sense anyway. (I liked Erin Brockovitch, but I now think it was a fluke that will never come again.) Any director who wastes valuable time watching female boxing instead of learning how to make better movies has lost me already. In the opening scene, Channing Tatum walks into a roadside diner in upstate New York and smacks the living daylights out of a woman named Mallory Kane, played by Ms. Carano with more muscles than charm. Naturally, she turns the tables and leaves him unconscious, steals a car belonging to a mind-blown young man named Scott (Michael Angarano), and drives away. Screeching and careering through the snow, she relates everything that happened to her as Scott works hard to keep from screaming before he’s excised from the movie and never seen again. Cut to Washington, D.C., where the overexposed Ewan McGregor is instructed by boss Michael Douglas to eliminate the two-fisted Mallory. Flashback even further to Barcelona, where she and Mr. Tatum were once lovers on a hostage-rescue mission, before she discovered she was marked for assassination. In Dublin, while tracking down a Chinese nationalist, she poses as the wife of another secret agent, played with typical out-of-the-shower, tight-towel nakedness by gym-pumped Michael Fassbender, but instead of taking her to bed he tries to take her out. In retaliation, she chokes him with thighs like sandbags during Hurricane Katrina and fires a bullet through his handsome head. Trying to figure out why she’s been betrayed in an interminable series of splat-crack-pow scenes, she turns into a rogue agent and goes viral, throwing herself off rooftops, smashing through plate-glass windows, leaping from one building to another, bouncing off walls and kicking a lot of groins. It all ends up back in the present, at the elegant New Mexico home of her father, a former Marine turned best-selling author, curiously played by the sturdy and dependable Bill Paxton, who is very good, very brief and very much reduced to the status of a walk-on. Surprise! The anonymous killers and thugs show up, and there’s more fighting to come as she demolishes a lot of beautiful furniture and marvelous architecture, heading for one last showdown with one final master criminal (Antonio Banderas, unrecognizable behind a bushy mouse-gray beard). One can only wonder what Mr. Soderbergh paid so many first-cabin alpha males to make fools of themselves in this piece of junk.

The leap-frog settings across two continents are more eloquent than anything in the dumb, sophomoric script by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote the screenplay for Mr. Soderbergh’s pretentious and unwatchable Kafka. You realize early that nobody connected with Haywire has any interest in coherent narrative filmmaking. The movie is nothing more than a locker-room joke. Nothing resembling plot, character development or a star-making career move of any kind is anywhere apparent. The whole point of this time-wasting farrago of idiocy is that women can cut, kick, slash, burn, maim and kill just like men—and make bad movies that are just as stupid. Mr. Soderbergh doesn’t even try to guide his unknown, inexperienced leading lady from the fight ring to the acting arena. He just cranks up the camera and lets her punch herself catatonic. Maybe it’s the role she’s playing, but Gina Carano has all the charisma of a Sherman tank.

rreed@observer.com

HAYWIRE

Running Time 93 minutes

Written by Lem Dobbs

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Starring Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor and Michael Fassbender

1/4

Ewan McGregor.

We're here to tell you just how to set your DVR before heading out for drinks or dinner--or just watching something better on TV!

The Ghost Writer: This 2010 political thriller got a bit buried by a crummy release date, and by an audience newly aware of Roman Polanski from international-crime news, not the Hollywood trades. If you're not one of the conscientious objectors to Mr. Polanski's work, there's a lot here to like: the director decided to make a film of a very pulpy airport thriller about the muddled, disappointing legacy of a bellicose British Prime Minister, and the writer tasked to organize that politician's life into a memoir. As that ghostwriter, Ewan McGregor lurks around a windy, wintry New England town--if you liked the vistas and super-chilly mood of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, this is for you. If there was ever a man to sell the only slightly inhuman charisma of a Tony Blair type, it was Pierce Brosnan, and Kim Cattrall really sells her role as a devoted secretary. (Really!) The movie's biggest fault, and the best argument for its not ever getting an audience, is the absence of charisma at its center--Mr. Polanski maybe oversells just how much a ghostwriter turns himself into a vacuum around which interesting things swirl.

Set your DVR for The Movie Channel at 8pm.

McGregor: "sparse butter-yellow hair"?

HBO already announced that Dianne Wiest and Chris Cooper will be playing the parents in HBO's forthcoming adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections. Now director Noah Baumbach has named Ewan McGregor to play their son Chip, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

At the beginning of The Corrections, Franzen describes Chip this way: "Chip was a tall, gym-built man with crow’s-feet and sparse butter-yellow hair; if the girl had noticed him, she might have thought he was a little too old for the leather he was wearing." That sounds about right, except for the sparse hair part.

Russell's sexuality (something Mr. Carrey cannot or will not play with any real honesty or conviction) is central to the story, but first you have to see how he evolves. When we first meet him, he's a happy family man in Georgia with a wife and daughter who plays the church organ, then a white-collar businessman, then a cop. All it takes is a car accident, and he emerges screaming from the ambulance with a permanently limp wrist dangling from his arm. Deserting his family, he moves to Florida with a boyfriend who looks like a porno star and comes out of the closet with a crash--but being gay is expensive, dontcha know, so he turns to insurance fraud and lands in the state penitentiary, where he meets a handsome bottle blond in the library who is in for grand theft auto, and it's love at first lunge. Steven pulls every trick in the system to share a honeymoon cell. Think this is not a heart-shaped candy box of a love story? Surrounded by profanity and violence behind bars, Steven and Phillip slow-dance in their cell to Johnny Mathis singing "Chances Are."

When he gets out, he dons bow ties and tortoise-shell glasses, pretends to be a hot-shot defense attorney and sets Phillip free. To pay for their new love nest, he resorts to his old chicanery, conning his way into a powerful job as financial adviser to a big investment firm and embezzling millions. It's back to the slammer again, but this guy is just getting started. In his most sensational acting job, he lands in the prison infirmary where he commits the ultimate con, starving himself into convincing the doctors he's a dying AIDS patient (nobody even bothers to take a blood test??), and escapes again. Look him up on the Internet and you won't believe the rest of the story. (It's not over yet.) You also won't believe he looks anything like Jim Carrey.

This is an oddball tale that is well worth telling, but Mr. Carrey simply cannot resist turning it into a Three Stooges routine in drag. The real Steven Russell looks like a mischievous, balding construction hard hat in retirement whose biggest weakness is a frail, soft-spoken, mild-mannered younger man named Phillip Morris. Phillip is the girlfriend who needs protection and guidance in exchange for a good time in the Porthault linen, but Ewan McGregor plays him like a strong, dependable Gibraltar. It's Mr. Carrey who throws himself all over the scenery like a male Betty Hutton. He develops a certain callow tone and rag doll comedic style, but it's hard to tell whether so much kinetic energy comes from the second-rate writing and direction of John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (Bad Santa) or the star's own special brand of breathless violence. He is never still. He moves like a 78-rpm recording on automatic replay, rarely pausing to inhale. I admire him for risking the loyalty of his fans in a courageous attempt to erode barriers in mainstream cinema, but it would have been more satisfactory and remarkable if he had played it straight (no pun intended). Don't expect prurience. The kissing is in your face, but contrary to the reports from Sundance, where it was unveiled to a shocked audience almost a year ago, the sex scenes have either been excised or they never existed in the first place. Mr. Carrey has balls of brass, but seeing him dressed flamboyantly in fish-net bikinis and high-heel Nancy Sinatra boots is an experience I hope never to repeat again in this lifetime. In his most recent interview, Steven Russell says he still loves Phillip Morris. He spends his time behind bars hatching new escape plots while keeping fit and fashionable, but there's only so much you can do with handcuffs.

rreed@observer.com

I LOVE YOU, PHILLIP MORRIS
Running time 100 minutes
Written and directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, based on a book by Steve McVicker
Starring Ewan McGregor, Jim Carrey, Leslie Mann

2/4

Shutter Island

What's the story: If it feels like you've been waiting for Shutter Island to reach theaters since forever, that's because you have. As seems to be the trend here in 2010, Martin Scorsese's follow-up to the Oscar-winning The Departed—like The Wolfman and the upcoming Matt Damon film The Green Zone—was originally supposed to come out in the fall of 2009. It was pushed back to February, though, after Paramount deemed the film unworthy of awards consideration. Never mind that with ten Best Picture slots, the chances of something with a pedigree as strong as Shutter Island getting selected would have been pretty high no matter what; lest we forget, The Blind Side is a Best Picture nominee. Anyway! Based on the book by Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island follows a pair of U.S. Marshalls (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) sent to solve a missing person case at the mental hospital on Shutter Island. Needless to say, things aren't anywhere near what they appear, something you can probably ascertain from the gives-away-too-much-plot trailer. The reviews have been solid, but even the most glowing notices concede that Mr. Scorsese has made nothing more than a B-movie thriller that indulges in all his film school fantasies. Set your expectations to pulpy and hang on for the ride.

Who should see it: The ghosts of Sam Fuller and Alfred Hitchcock.

The Ghost Writer

What's the story: Maybe a better title would have been The Ghost Director. Only the second film Roman Polanski has directed since winning his Best Director Oscar for The Pianist in 2002, The Ghost Writer had to be completed while the director was held under house arrest. The ageless Ewan McGregor stars as the titular author who gets caught up in a web of intrigue (is there any other kind?) while working on the memoir of a former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan). There are not-so-slightly veiled references to Tony Blair, Kim Cattrall with a British accent and (apparently) the best use of a car GPS navigator in Hollywood history, but based on the reviews, The Ghost Writer still ends up falling way short.

Who should see it: Jack Nicholson.

Can one put aside all the turmoil and controversy swirling around Roman Polanski while watching his latest film The Ghost Writer? Not very easily: The 76-year-old director was in the midst of postproduction when he was apprehended by Swiss police in 2009, and had to finish the film while under house arrest. It’s impossible to know whether this affected the finished product (based on the Robert Harris best seller), which has moments of heart-pounding suspense and brief glimmers of greatness, thanks to fine performances by Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Williams, but overall feels uneven, sprawling and strangely incomplete.

Mr. McGregor plays the unnamed protagonist, the “Ghost” hired to finish the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lange (Pierce Brosnan). For various, incomprehensible reasons, he’s sent to the United States to hole up with Mr. Lange, his wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), and his inappropriately close chief of staff (Kim Cattrell). The setting is supposed to be Martha’s Vineyard, but even if one didn’t know that Mr. Polanski hasn’t set foot on American soil since 1978, it’s pretty clear that the sandy beaches seen in the film are not Massachusetts. (It was filmed in Germany, and looks like it.) The Ghost finds himself in over his head fairly quickly: His predecessor drowned under mysterious circumstances, and Lange’s staff seems easily spooked and paranoid over the contents of the unfinished biography, which is kept under closely guarded lock and key. Before you know it, political cover-ups are unfolding, creepy intrigue is descending and we’re watching the best supporting performance by a car’s GPS system ever.

Mr. McGregor gets it all just right (and never seems to age at all), and it was a stroke of genius casting to put Mr. Brosnan as a maybe-shady politician. (Note to Hollywood: Brosnan as bad guy, think about it!) Ms. Cattrell’s English accent is surprisingly good, if a little distracting; Tom Wilkinson delivers perhaps the best scene in the film; and Ms. Williams—who’s been oddly missing since big roles in Rushmore and The Sixth Sense—ends up being perhaps the most complex of all the characters. And yet, and yet. There’s been buzz over the idea that the book/film is nothing but a thinly veiled swipe at the real-life former British prime minister, Tony Blair, but I’m guessing more moviegoers will be thinking about the real-life troubles of Mr. Polanski instead.

svilkomerson@observer.com

The Men Who Stare at Goats
Running time 93 minutes
Written by Peter Straughan
Directed by Grant Heslov
Starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges

The Men Who Stare at Goats, the latest George Clooney fiasco, is like getting stung by a wasp on the inside of your eyelid. You are blinded to all reason and the agony lasts for days. Despite Mr. Clooney’s easygoing charm and obvious good looks, his film choices point to an appalling lack of both intelligence and taste. He just doesn’t seem interested in narrative movies that make sense, and even worse, he has an exasperating tendency to turn his projects over to buddies and basketball cronies, whether or not they have any talent. (In George Clooney movies, talent is optional.) The result is a depressingly high track record of incomprehensible bores like Solaris, Syriana, Michael Clayton, the dumb, overplotted Ocean’s flicks by the overrated Steven Soderbergh … the list is long. In fact, the marvelous and insightful Good Night, and Good Luck is the only major exception in a career notable for frat-house one-liners and photo op mugging over artistic quality. At the press conference for The Men Who Stare at Goats in Toronto, when asked what drew him to a movie this bad, he deadpanned, “I’ve known Grant Heslov [the director] since 1992, and he has some compromising photos of me, so I really had no choice.”

It’s hard to believe this is the same Mr. Heslov who helped write Good Night, and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow and the McCarthy witch hunts. He may be Clooney’s longtime filmmaking partner, but he is certainly no director, and this wobbly, one-legged directorial debut proves it. It’s supposed to be a takeoff on Dr. Strangelove, with all of the slobbering, winking, brain-dead overacting on display in the abominable Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?; it pastes together disconnected stories from a book by Jon Ronson about the U.S. Army’s use of parapsychological research in Iraq. Ewan McGregor, who shows up in what feels like at least half of the movies released today (and seems to get worse in each one), plays a down-and-out reporter from Michigan who travels to Fort Bragg in 1983 to interview a top-secret brigade of psychic and paranormal soldiers trained in New Age warfare. The result is surreal and patently absurd as he tags along to Kuwait as a war correspondent with a gang of illogical military muttonheads trained to make themselves invisible and impersonate Jedi warriors in Star Wars epics, run through walls and kill goats by staring them to death. Dedicated to ending the “war on terror” without violence, these “warrior monks” hike across the Iraq desert in search of the founder of the “First Earth Battalion”—a pony-tailed acid head freak named Django (Jeff Bridges, re-creating his performance as the Dude in The Big Lebowski). As part of their combat training, he encourages his foot soldiers to stop shaving, grow long hair, wear Jedi robes and dance—a natural for Mr. Clooney, who is in civilian life a dance instructor. They spout nonsense about steroids and solar cooking on sand dunes and perform sadistic experiments on animals, and their nemesis is new recruit Kevin Spacey, whose special talent is spoon bending. They’re all crazy and none of their theories work, and neither does the movie.

The structure is nothing more than a series of anything-goes contrivances. It is never clear what the goal is (the reporter narrates: “I was on a mission—even I didn’t know what the mission was”), although when recruited to find the hideout of General Noriega, the Jedis say, “Ask Angela Lansbury.” Paranoid and nutty as an Almond Joy, Bridges uses pension fund money to hire hookers and, inspired by the discovery that the Russians are torturing kittens in the name of psychic warfare, uses Barney the Purple Dinosaur’s “I Love You” song as a torture technique of his own. When he finally gets a dishonorable discharge, you wonder why it took the Pentagon so long. Using his Jedi powers for evil instead of peace, Mr. Clooney comes unhinged and has Jonathan Demme–homage nightmares called “the silence of the goats.”

It’s episodic and broadly incoherent; the direction is all over the map; and the acting is so atrocious it wouldn’t get past a Saturday Night Live dress rehearsal. There’s a big difference between comic acting and just plain goofing around, but nobody in this movie seems to know it. Mr. Clooney knocks himself out making fun-house faces, but shows no real talent for political satire. (Didn’t the people who financed this trash remember him in Three Kings?) The script by Peter Straughan is demented jabberwocky that just makes you groan. Example: The Jedi motto is “I will drink your blue water, live in your red clay and eat your green skin.” Huh? Say what? This cinematic Katrina is only 93 minutes long but seems like 93 days of hard labor.

rreed@observer.com