Who needs bullets when you can bend spoons?

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First one to bleat, er... blink, loses: Clooney gives it his best ba-a-a-a-a-d stare.

When you get right down to it, we're all freaks. Every one of us suspects we might be special in some way, whether it's a persistent Cinderella complex that makes us believe we're lost heirs to a large fortune, or maybe gifted with some talent that could save the world.

Maybe you're just one of those people who believes he or she can turn street lights on and off with your mere presence.

Whatever the perceived secret skill happens to be, The Men Who Stare at Goats will make those phantom gifts throb because as unlikely as this whole story happens to be, it's also strangely believable.

That's because it's true.

Based on journalist Jon Ronson's book of the same name, The Men Who Stare at Goats takes us into the bizarre ---- but true -- world of the First Earth Battalion, a real-life division of the United States military that didn't use traditional weapons to fight a traditional enemy.

The First Earth soldiers were New Age practitioners who used their psychic powers to stupefy, confuse, conceal and sometimes kill the enemy. When we first meet them, they're not even a group yet -- just an idea tickling the paranoia at the base of the Pentagon's brain.

Believing their enemies were using paranormal warriors, the U.S. army recruited one of its very best to head up a touchie-feelie offensive that could render the enemy a quivering mass of plasma.

The program isn't a failure, but until a soldier by the name of Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) joins the brigade, it isn't a success either. Turns out Cassady is psychically gifted: He can stop a goat's heart just by staring at it.

What follows from here is pure lunacy -- in a good way -- as a series of extended flashbacks kicks into high gear.

Using a Ronson-like character as our guide through the olive-drab looking glass, we're introduced to Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a journalist who stumbles into an amazing truth.

Wilton hears about the New Age "Jedi Warriors" of the U.S. army, and eventually tracks one down in Cassady. By their second encounter, they're knee deep in trouble.

Since we never quite know exactly what's going on, let alone what might happen next, the movie has all the steep banked curves of a question mark -- and that keeps things exciting.

Under Grant Heslov's (co-writer on Good Night, and Good Luck) direction, all the crazy bits and pieces of this story come together like an explosion filmed in reverse -- where we see the razor-sharp shrapnel first, out of context and entirely threatening, before we see where it came from and what it was in its original form.

Heslov convinces us we're watching a farce about silly soldiers and the lengths they'll go to in order to get the upper hand. But if you look a little deeper, The Men Who Stare at Goats is also a very powerful treatise on the military, and the way it treats -- and eats -- its own.

Coupled with Heslov's smart bombs dropped from the director's chair, the whole movie finds an urgent tone that serves the story, and its underlying message of being an individual, despite wearing a uniform.

A very odd, but entirely engaging adventure on the wild side, The Men Who Stare at Goats will no doubt make you gaze at yourself a whole new way.

-- Canwest News Service

Other Voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of The Men Who Stare at Goats.

It actually doesn't matter if the book is truthful. It doesn't claim the paranormal powers are real. Ronson simply says some officials thought they might be -- and that if they were, we had to get there first. The movie is funny either way.

-- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

In fits and starts, director Heslov captures a lot of the drolly incredulous spirit of the book. It's just too bad the dots don't connect better.

-- David Germain, Associated Press

The Men Who Stare at Goats is a magical-realist sitcom war farce that ends up being about nothing but its own slovenly smugness.

-- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Clooney gives it everything, but what does he get in return? A void where the story is meant to be.

-- Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

Intended as a farcical antidote to big-screen bores about Afghanistan and Iraq, it's twice as pompous and endlessly tedious.

-- Rex Reed, New York Observer

A smart satirical comedy.

-- Mark Adams, Daily Mirror

-- Compiled by Shane Minkin

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 6, 2009 D7