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The Men Who Stare at Goats | Film review

Source: guardian.co.uk Film

Nov 08, 2009

Summary

Like Dr Strangelove, this crazy comedy of military madness is based on a non-fiction work (Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats), and stars Ewan McGregor as Bob Wilton, a frustrated Michigan journalist in search of adventure who heads for the Middle East in 2003. In Kuwait he hitches a lift into Iraq from Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former member of the New Earth Army, a secret, experimental branch of the US military trained in using psychic powers learned from the 1970s counter-culture. Cassady is both formidably intelligent and as mad as a brass hatter, and so is everyone to whom he introduces Wilton. For a while the film is as funny and frightening as the scenes between Peter Sellers's Group Captain Mandrake and Sterling Hayden's General Jack D Ripper in Strangelove. But the picture soon runs literally and figuratively into the sands and can't dig itself out.