Not Clooney; he’s fine. Actually, his Lyn Cassady - a rogue US Army psychic warrior - is the sort of part tailor-made for this star: supremely confident, a little nuts, primarily reactive. Clooney works best when there’s a Normal for him to bounce off; here that Normal is journalist Bob Wilton, a fictional stand-in for Ronson who (unlike the author) is American and who’s played by British actor Ewan McGregor with a vaguely East Coast accent that should never have made it through Customs.
It’s the early days of the 2003 Iraq invasion, and Wilton is trying to embed himself in-country to prove his macho bona fides to an ex-wife who couldn’t care less. The journalist meets Cassady, who’s posing as a private contractor but whose true identity as a veteran of the shadowy New Earth Army is soon smoked out.
What’s the New Earth Army? Imagine that a Vietnam veteran in the early 1970s dropped out, did a ton of drugs, absorbed every New Age bromide the Left Coast had to offer, then created an experimental unit of hippie warriors trained in psychic arts like “remote viewing’’ (i.e., ESP) and, yes, the ability to stare goats to death. In the real world, the “First Earth Battalion’’ never made it past a training manual that was then co-opted by the US military for psychological warfare and other nefarious purposes. In the movie - well, we get Jeff Bridges playing “The Dude Goes to War.’’
Bridges is cast as New Earth Army mastermind Bill Django, a ponytailed peacenik fox let loose in the Pentagon henhouse. The richest, most weirdly funny scenes in “The Men Who Stare at Goats’’ are the flashbacks to the secret unit’s training sessions, in which recruits Clooney (with long hair about as convincing as McGregor’s accent), Stephen Root, and others let their inner pagans loose, mastering the “sparkly eyes technique’’ and dancing about like teenage girls at a Grateful Dead concert.
