The Men Who Stare At Goats

Editorial

Squaring up against Clooney is Ewan McGregor, as our way into this movie. If you can't see how Jon Ronson's book about US experiments with psychic warfare could be adapted wholesale, you're right — it can't, and they haven't tried.

Instead, McGregor has the burden of selling us the fictional backbone of the film: after meeting Lyn Cassady in a hotel bar while covering the Iraq War from the sidelines in Kuwait, his journalist Bob Wilton relays the contents of Ronson's book as a series of flashbacks, gleaned from his conversations with Cassady on a road trip to Iraq. It's one step up from voiceover, but McGregor maintains a wide-eyed innocence that reflects the often naive tone of Ronson's writing.

First we get Dodgeball's Stephen Root as a man who claims to have killed a hamster with his mind. Then we're served Stephen Lang as the officer who believes that he'll be able to run through walls. But the stand-out performance has to be Jeff Bridges as Bill Django, the only semi-fictional founding father of Psy-Ops, a ponytailed hippie whose attempts to bring love, peace and harmony into a world geared towards pain, death and destruction provide the film's comic highlights. Additionally, Kevin Spacey is just terrific as Larry Hooper. And when Bridges, Clooney and Spacey are all on screen, The Men Who Stare At Goats feels most alive — like a military version of Anchorman — while Heslov's bright, heightened colour palette adds the sense of an almost magical, distant summer.

Damon Wise