“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is an attempt to inject some levity into the typically stone-faced war genre with a story about supernatural tactics used by the Army. With George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor bolstering the ranks of the can’t-miss concept, hilarity and weirdness ought to rule the roost.

They don’t. “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is bleating awful. Almost as bad as that pun.

McGregor stars as Bob Wilton, a sad-sack journalist whose wife dumps him for a man with a robotic arm. In a fit of “I’ll show you up-itis” Wilton flees to Iraq, where the Second Gulf War is just getting under way, to land the story of a lifetime.

He might have something when he meets Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a manic presence who claims to be a super-soldier. To be more specific — a Jedi warrior.

Wilton balks, and the movie makes sure to pause to hold up a giant “LAUGH” sign to point out the irony. And once isn’t enough — the Jedi joke gets bandied about so many times, you start to expect a picture-in-picture image of McGregor costumed as Obi-Wan Kenobi, complete with lightsaber and Jedi rattail, to invade the bottom corner of the screen. We got it the first time, movie.

Wilton decides to tag along with Cassady, who claims to be on a top-secret mission, while at the same time relaying the tale of how he first became involved in the Army’s foray into the supernatural.

Vietnam vet Bill Django (Bridges) began to explore New Age tactics, and Cassady was one of the original members of the new outfit. Soldiers practiced meditation and mind-reading to explore non-violent resolution to conflict. Hallucinogens played a not-unimportant role.

Things began to change though with the appearance of a new recruit, Larry Hooper (Spacey), who was quickly at odds with almost everyone in the unit. His presence led to more sinister undertakings, including attempting to stop creatures’ hearts simply by staring at them. Goats were the guinea pigs.

Based on the 2004 book by Jon Ronson, it’s fascinating to think about how many of these ideas were actually implemented by the military, and it’s great fodder for a film even if only a quarter of it is true.

But the film fumbles hard with its insistence on a flashback story structure. The development of the paranormal tactics is the compelling stuff, not the present-day meandering of Wilton and Cassady around the desert. Despite McGregor’s charisma, Wilton is one terribly dull protagonist and should have been relegated to the edges of this piece of celluloid, rather than its center.

The supernatural tactics are relegated for the most part to a series of flashbacks; there are more cutaway gags here than in a three-hour block of “Family Guy.” It cuts the legs out from underneath what might have been some fairly poignant material and it reduces the humor to mostly sight gags.

Spacey’s flat villain-type is a waste of space, but Clooney and Bridges garner some chuckles. Clooney has done the delusions of grandeur thing quite well before (“O Brother Where Art Thou,” “Burn After Reading”) and Bridges has gotten plenty of mileage out of the riff he’s been doing on “The Big Lebowski’s” The Dude for more than a decade, but the familiarity of these characters is a nice touchstone in a film that wears thin on patience.

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” isn’t worth 90 minutes of your eye-time.

The film opens today at Hollywood Spotlight 14, Moore Warren, Harkins Bricktown and others.