COMEDY; 1hr 33min
STARRING: George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey
Highly decorated: from left, Clooney and Spacey
Super soldiers. Jedi warriors. Men who can kill a goat stone-dead by eyeballing it. It sounds like Hollywood froth, but The Men Who Stare at Goats is based on a nonfiction book by journalist Jon Ronson.
The truth might be out there but when reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) meets oddball Lyn Cassady (Clooney), he is initially not buying it. Cassady looks like a middle-rung businessman but reveals that he is actually a member of the US Army’s radical New Earth Army whose telepathic warriors can charge through walls and whose leader (Bridges) has disappeared. Sensing a whopping story, Wilton joins Cassady’s search-and-rescue mission, which culminates at a secret training facility in Iraq, set up by a dodgy psychic (Spacey). Welcome to the disarming forces.
Whatever the facts of the matter, Cassady has the unflinching courage of conviction and Clooney plays him dead straight. In fact, the wackier the shambolic situation gets (and it does, a herd of goats and a mass dose of LSD included), the more driven and serious Lyn Cassady becomes. Superpowers will do that to you.
