Susan Granger’s review of “The Men Who Stare at Goats” (Overture Films)
It’s no secret that the U.S. military intelligence has been working on ways to harness the paranormal to combat its enemies. Best-selling author Dan Brown refers to this practice in “The Lost Symbol,” noting the 1995 “Stargate/Scannate” scandal involving remote telepathic viewing, and this mind-blowing, far-fetched tale was inspired by Jon Ronson’s 2004 non-fiction best-seller of the same name.
Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) is a cynical, Ann Arbor, Michigan-based journalist who is eager to get into Iraq at the time of the Bush invasion. While interviewing Gus Lacey (Stephen Root), who claims to have psychic powers, he hears a story about a top-secret unit called Jedi Knights, ESP experts trained to kill animals by staring at them; the most gifted of these spies was Lyn Cassady, who has since disappeared. But when Wilton is in Kuwait City in 2003, looking for a new angle on the war, he befriends “Skip” (Clooney), who purports to be an Arkansas trashcan salesman but is really Cassady on a super-secret black-ops mission. According to the enigmatic but very-persuasive Cassady, there’s a New Earth Army of “warrior monks,” formed back in 1979 by a Vietnam vet-turned-New Age hippie, Lt. Col. Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), who insists: “We must be the first superpower to have super powers.”
In the meantime, Wilton and Cassady get lost in the desert, kidnapped by insurgents and traded by terrorists, winding up in the secret training camp of another “warrior monk,” villainous Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), who took over after having Django kicked out in disgrace.
Written by Peter Straughan and directed by Grant Heslov (who collaborated with George Clooney writing “Good Night and Good Luck”), it’s a fragmented, overtly anti-military spoof with sporadic overtones reminiscent of “Dr. Strangelove” and “M.A.S.H.” Clooney and McGregor keep their cool but Spacey and Bridges are hippies-gone-berserk. In fact, Bridges seems to recreate The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.”
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is a surreal, absurdly satirical 7, claiming “More of this is true than you’d believe.”
