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.
Django’s shamanistic maxims pepper the script like hilarious smart bombs – “We must become the first superpower with super powers,’’ “Be all you can be,’’ “The US Army has no alternative but to be wonderful.’’ When Cassady successfully deploys a small plastic widget that “can hurt you a hundred different ways’’ (it looks like an ice scraper), the movie finds its groove: the place where America’s spiritual yearnings and killer instincts meet and intertwine.
But it’s early