Funny, if not entirely successful adaptation of Jon Ronson’s book and doc travelogue through paranoid mindscapes, The Men Who Stares at Goats is a curious affair. By no means an obvious or logical choice for adaptation into a Major Motion Picture, that hasn’t deterred director Grant Heslov and screenwriter Peter Straughan from having an entertaining (if not wholly convincing) stab at it.
Ronson ersatz, now an American journalist with marital difficulties, is played with a constant look of bewilderment by Ewan McGregor. He might well look confused; a chance encounter with renegade psychic government op George Clooney lands our hero in the Middle East and what R. Lee Ermey would call ‘a world of shit’.
With a characteristically charismatic Clooney as our guide, a compelling pseudo history of the US military emerges; in response to USSR experimentation in parapsychology, Uncle Sam called in Jeff Bridges - The Dude, who else? - to marshal a posse of spoon-benders, freaks and hippies.
The script is snappy, the performances are pitch perfect, the vibes are nicely discombobulating, but as the tale gets taller, The Men Who Stare soon runs out of places to go. Without Ronson’s sensible anti-Gothic counterpoint, the film is left, literally and figuratively, with its head in the clouds. Only a hardcore conspiracy nut could love the sub-Kaufman twist that rounds off this otherwise entertaining yarn.