Goats

Directed by Grant Heslov. Starring George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, Rebecca Mader 15A cert, gen release, 93 min

HOW FAR can you get with little else but charm and goodwill in your backpack? On the evidence of this enjoyably barmy adaptation of a nonfiction book by Jon Ronson, halfway round the world and back again.

The Men Who Stare at Goatsis so unsure of its own place in the universe that it often threatens to slide off the screen and drain through the gutter beneath. Is it a genuine attempt to convey information about the US armed forces' interest in psychic research? Is it a postmodern conundrum in the spirit of Spike Jonze's work? Is it an exercise in liberal satire? Who cares? It features George Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey as military men who believe they can read minds, foretell the future and, yes, kill goats just by looking at them. That's more than enough to justify the admission price.

In its slippery approach to the truth as well as its confidence in its own irresistibility, The Men Who Stare at Goatshas much in common with Clooney's equally peculiar Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Ewan "Weak Link" McGregor plays an American journalist who, following the break-up of his marriage, heads for the Middle East in search of the big story.

In a Kuwait hotel he bumps into an American officer named Lyn Cassidy and, because the fellow has George Clooney's agreeable head, gets drawn into his story about covert US military divisions, nicknamed "Jedi warriors", who dabble in paranormal activity. "What's a Jedi warrior?" McGregor asks in the desperate hope that we'll remember he was once in a Star Warsfilm.

It’s just as well the picture features such amiable performances and wallows in such fascinating quasi-factual backwaters, because, with the best will in the world, you couldn’t say that it has anything like a plot.

Told largely in flashback, while Clooney and Weak Link stagger their way from desert to hostage situation to military detention, The Men Who Stare at Goatsis almost zany enough to have sprung from the same 1960s counterculture that spawned the Jedi units. Maybe the ending is too stupid to bear, perhaps the connection to the facts is too insecure, but you'd have to be a very hard-hearted person indeed to resist this weird film's suave advances.

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS ***

Directedby Grant Heslov. StarringGeorge Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, Rebecca Mader 15A cert, gen release, 93 min

GREEN RATING ***:The overall message of this eccentric espionage film is peace and love, man. But it's not totally green – the production depends on plenty of extras, at least one large set, one explosion and a number of gas-guzzling helicopters. JG