The Informant!/The Men Who Stare At Goats

Both these films received rather lukewarm reviews last Autumn.  This is a shame, as I thoroughly enjoyed both.

"The Informant!" gives Steven Sodeburgh another chance to demonstrate his love of cheesy old film titles and soundtracks.  This soundtrack sounds like it came from a 1970's sitcom and there is something Reggie Perrin-esque about Mark Whitacre (played by Matt Damon) a senior executive at biochem firm ADM.  ADM is a firm so large - so all-pervasive - that they can justifiably claim to have played some part in almost every product in every fridge and pantry in America.

Whitacre comes to the attention of the FBI, when he uncovers a plot to extort money from ADM by a mole who is sabotaging their plant.  However, in the course of their investigations he just happens to mention an illegal price-fixing conspiracy between ADM and their Japanese and Korean counterparts.  The next thing you know, Mark is wired by the FBI and spends the next 2 years collecting incriminating information for them.  Mark seems to enjoy the task and refers to himself as 0014 ("Twice as smart as 007").  Then there's his ongoing monologue to the bug they've attached to him:

WHITACRE: It is 8:15 and I have just breached the entrance of the ADM offices.  Good morning Mark Chevron, head of our lycine manufacturing facility!  How is it going?

To say much more about what happens would be to spoil it.  Suffice to say that things become very tangled indeed due to the fact that Mark Whitacre appears to have gone BONKERS during the course of the investigation.  This film left Caro and me going, "He did WHAT??"  And on a truth-stranger-than-fiction basis, we enjoyed it a lot.  8/10

But if "The Informant!" is bonkers, "The Men Who Stare At Goats" is just in-BLOOMIN-sane.  It tells the (mostly) true story of the New Earth Battalion, a division within the US military dedicated to finding soldiers with psychic powers and turning them into "Jedi Mind Warriors".  No, those are not my words.  That's actually what they said they were trying to do.

The story of the film is that reporter Ewen McGregor is taken under the wing of one of these mind-warriors (George Clooney) on a mission in Iraq.  During the course of his mission, Clooney explains the history of the unit, and how it was eventually ruined by those who sought to turn it from its hippy, new-agey, peace-keeping origins into a psychic weapon to be used against enemies in order to kill them with mind-bullets.

It's probably the fact that a story structure has been imposed on "Goats" that weakens it a little.  Although the detail on the history of the unit is compelling (and very funny) the effect is weakened by the M*A*S*H-esque final act in which Clooney gets to confront his evil counterpart (Kevin Spacey in Dick Dastardly mode) and I wonder if the facts would have been better served by a documentary.

Still, I enjoyed the film very much anyway - and Jeff Bridges is a hoot as Dude-esque Bob Django, the founder of the New Earth Battalion.  8/10

HOOPER: Sergeant Django used military funding in order to procure prostitutes!
DJANGO: That is a lie!  I did no such thing!
HOOPER: He also used military funding to procure drugs and alcohol!
DJANGO: That is a LIE!  Oh, wait...  maybe not.... but the hooker thing definitely isn't true.