The Men Who Stare at Goats (***)

Directed by: Grant Heslov

Starring: George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Lang, Robert Patrick, Stephen Root

Seen: May 4^th 2010

*** Out of ****

Bob Wilton (McGregor) is a reporter for the Ann Arbor Daily Telegram, and he is on the hunt for interesting stories. One lead takes him to the home of Gus Lacey (Root), who can go to remote places with the power of his mind. He labels Gus as crazy and doesn’t even bother with the story. When his marriage dissolves in a nasty way, he decides to go and look for adventure, and ends up in Kuwait, where he meets Lyn Cassady (Clooney) only because he remembers the name from his interview with Gus Lacey. He attaches himself to Lyn, and in this way eventually ends up in Iraq.

Cassady is full of theories and stories about psychic powers and warfare, and while they travel deeper into Iraq on Lyn’s latest mission, to remote find someone while also not knowing who or what, he tells Bob a lot of stories about his history in the army. Lyn formed part of an almost hippie new age special forces team called the New Earth Army, headed up by Bill Django (Bridges), who originally started the unit to try and explain a vision he saw during a near death experience in the Vietnam war when his very green team had difficulty shooting to kill from the get go. While Lyn and Bob are kidnapped by insurgents and saved by contractors and run away from said contractors and escape back into the desert and get lost and get picked up by different contractors, Lyn keeps telling Bob old stories about the New Earth Army and its members, including Larry Hooper (Spacey), who seemed to represent the dark side of the New Earth Army and Brigadier General Hopgood (Lang), the commander who is strangely accepting towards whatever direction Bill Django decides to take with the unit.

The movie starts with the disclaimer that more of this is true that you would expect, and most of what happens in the movie seems too strange to actually be fiction, if you can say it that way. Lyn talks about soldiers becoming invisible at one stage, but that soon reverts to “finding ways of not being seen”. Almost everything in the movie is ridiculous in some way, and will be, for some, laugh-out-loud, and for others simply very amusing. Even things like Lyn training to make a snap-decision are mocked with, as while discussing the ability to quickly decide, Lyn takes 30 minutes to make this decision, only for it to be very wrong.

The Men Who Stare at Goats derives its title from the guinea pigs the army used for testing whether the men in the New Earth Army have any actual capability, goats. They claimed they can stop a goat’s heart with the power of the mind, and in one instance, Lyn Cassady is shown to actually be able to do this. So the list of unlikely and unbelievable things in the movie keeps escalating, with the viewer left wondering which elements could possibly be true as claimed. Even Barney the purple dinosaur makes an appearance in The Men Who Stare at Goats – which turns out to be funny, amusing, and interesting in equal measure. If you’re looking for an off-beat comedy with great acting, Clooney in particular, The Men Who Stare at Goats is exactly the thing to save you from an afternoon of tedious boredom.