The Men Who Stare At Goats

It seems to be the case that back in the day, the US military had a psychic
warrior program. The Russians had one, because they believed the US had one,
and because the Russians had one, the US had to start one, just in case there
was anything in it. They did some pretty weird stuff. The journalist Jon Ronson
wrote a book on it, which was interesting.


What seems to have happened is that someone read the book, and thought that it
was pretty funny. And that you could write a story about these people. Hence
this.

What this is, is effectively a comedy parody of Apocalypse Now, set in the
Iraq war, kind of crossed with The Big Lebowski. George Clooney is a former
psychic soldier, summoned into Iraq to seek out his former commander, played by
Jeff Bridges (being The Dude) who is in the clutches of Kevin Spacey, a
renegade psychic soldier. Following him is Ewan Macgregor, a journalist who has
basically nothing better to do than tag along.

It's hard to pin it down. It's not spectacularly deep, and not exactly
a joke a minute. The humour comes from the weird things that people can make
themselves believe. The weakness comes from the fact that the situations are
somewhat based on fact, but the events aren't. I've a feeling the original book
would be funnier. Because real idiocy is better than fictional idiocy.


Overall, though, it's an amusing hour and a half of self-delusion and
misadventure, that doesn't quite scale the cliffs of insanity that you hope it
will, but is very entertaining for all that.