An unex­pect­edly funny film about whacko mil­i­tary special-op types engaged in para­nor­mal tech­niques to fight the Ene­mies of Freedom™

The blurb from the Odeon web­site says:

Inspired by a real life story and fea­tur­ing an all-star cast, ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’ is a dark com­edy about a top-secret wing of the U.S. mil­i­tary.

Reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGre­gor) meets Lyn Cas­sady (George Clooney), part of an exper­i­men­tal unit of psy­chic ‘War­rior Monks’ — who claim to read minds, walk through walls and kill goats sim­ply by star­ing at them!

When the unit’s leader, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), goes miss­ing Bob tracks him down to a secret train­ing camp run by clan­des­tine psy­chic Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey).

The alarm­ing thing is that ele­ments of the film are anchored in 1960’s real­ity: the US Army really did shoot dogs to train medics how to deal with gun­shot wounds, though whether they changed to goats because squad­dies found shoot­ing dogs unac­cept­able can’t be ver­i­fied. Were it a deci­sion made today one pre­sumes they’d have used women and kids from Falu­jah. Again. Equally the real­ity dodg­ing wacky wing of the CIA really did have a lav­ishly financed remote view­ing pro­gram: inspired per­haps by lib­eral the use of lib­er­ated CIA LSD.

There were finely judged touches of hilar­ity. Clooney refers to his unit as ‘Jedi’ war­riors and to the Ewan McGre­gor char­ac­ter as an unrecog­nised Jedi. Rather amus­ing, and one won­ders whether McGre­gor was only cast because of his Star Wars role just so that they could crack this joke.

I’d like to hate Clooney: he is one of those hand­some types seem­ingly all women love and while he can­not match Geeklawyer’s rugged good looks charm and turbo-charged totty pulling abil­ity he comes close. This is threat­en­ing. Despite that his per­for­mance has to be recog­nised as excel­lent: he deliv­ers funny lies with a gran­ite like straight face. Oh George, you annoy­ing fucker.

Bridges por­trayal of the unit’s found­ing spe­cial forces sol­dier turn­ing into a hippy who per­suades khaki clad gran­ite faced men-mountain into hold­ing flow­ers and doing tai-chi was bizarre and delightful.

Spacey McGre­gor and Bridges all per­formed well together and there was a def­i­nite chem­istry. It was also a lit­tle odd in a film such as this not to have that infu­ri­at­ing Hol­ly­wood cliché, the token female love inter­est: Kate Beck­in­sale was nowhere in sight.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is very much to be rec­om­mended as a genre & cliché defy­ing great watch.