Goat-Staring and Happyslapping

The Guardian doesn’t have a feature-film making subsidiary, but if it did it would probably make things like Grant Heslov’s The Men Who Stare At Goats (adapted from Jon Ronson’s book), about some of the wildly peculiar things the US Army did research into following Vietnam. It’s droll, offbeat, and politically somewhat left-of-centre.

The story has been pepped  up for the screen by ditching Ronson entirely (too English and effete, probably) in favour of fictional journalist Bob, played by Obi-Wan Kenobi Ewan McGregor, whose life is in a bit of a state. You’d’ve thought that going off to the invasion of Iraq would let Bob put things in perspective, but he has the dubious fortune to fall in with Lyn Cassidy (a slightly manic George Clooney), a US Army-trained ‘psychic warrior’, the product of the top secret Project Jedi. (McGregor has to ask ‘What’s a Jedi?’ with a straight face at one point – he gets bonus points for being a good sport, but this sort of thing isn’t going to help him put the franchise behind him.)

From this point on the movie splits, half of it detailing Bob and Lyn’s expedition into war-torn Iraq on a secret mission, the other explaining exactly what Project Jedi was and who the main players involved were. A great deal of deadpan slapstick ensues, most of it rather amusing. Jeff Bridges trades heavily on his Big Lebowski persona as the project’s founding father, a career soldier turned enthusiastic hippy, while Kevin Spacey is rather subdued as a member of Project Jedi who – ahem – turns to the Dark Side.

It’s not particularly coherent, nor is it very deep – the realities of being in the middle of an arguably illegal and unjustifiable invasion are rather glossed over, and the fact that the US Army spent millions of dollars on something so wacky is mostly just treated as a pretext for people falling hilariously off roofs and running headfirst into walls. There’s a nod to reality when Bob and Lyn get caught up in a firefight between rival private security companies in which most of the casualties are Iraqi civilians, but the film mostly keeps it light.

In the end the two strands come together – bang messily into each other would probably describe it better – as McGregor, Clooney, and Bridges team up to stop Spacey’s plans to further corrupt the spirit of the Jedi in Iraq itself. The film makes demands of the audience’s credibility throughout (the audience should cut it some slack – as the film itself says, more of it is true than you would believe) and the ending is just too daffy to convince.

It is, however, smartly played and slickly put together, and a fairly cheery night out is guaranteed for practically everyone.

The same cannot be said for Daniel Barber’s Harry Brown, which comes straight from the Daily Mail school of film-making (i.e. it’s even more bloody depressing than the average UK Film Council production). The plot resembles a mash-up of Death Wish and One Foot in the Grave, but the film isn’t as much fun as that sounds.

On a grimy British sink estate, achingly decent pensioner Harry Brown (the mighty Sir Michael Caine, giving a performance of typical precision, power, and grace) struggles to get on with his life, doing his best to ignore the activities of the teenage gangs that effectively run the area. But then his wife dies, and his best friend (David Bamber) makes the mistake of standing up to the gangs and is murdered as a result.  With the overworked police unable to make progress, and with nothing else left in his life, Harry decides to take matters into his own hands as only as decorated ex-Marine can…

 Harry Brown opens with a young woman being gunned down for fun and continues in a similarly dark and horrible vein throughout.  Were it not for the presence of a major star like Caine, I doubt it would have got more than an art house release – but the quality of the script and the supporting cast really justifies the relatively high profile this movie’s enjoying in the UK. Most memorable is the sheer look of the thing – picked out in drab and dirty greys and browns, the world shown here is convincingly bereft of life and colour and hope. It’s bleak to the point of despair – the only moment of humour coming when Caine stands over someone he’s just shot and mockingly berates him for not taking better care of his gun – with a body count not too far adrift of Shakespeare in one of his moods, but still manages to be utterly convincing.

Films about this sort of vigilanteism always run the risk of glorifying the kind of person who, in reality, would surely be as much of a nightmare as the people he pursues – and at the showing I attended, one person vocally agreed with a character who voices the opinion that Harry Brown is doing the police a favour by executing young gangsters. The stakes in this film are weighted a bit too heavily in Harry’s favour, and the audience encouraged to root for him a little too much, for it to be truly comfortable viewing.  The movie is well made and very watchable, but plumps for pat solutions and easy answers – too easy to be convincing. The end of the film suggests that the main consequence of Harry embarking on his killing spree is not a major urban disturbance and a string of corpses, but that he can use the local underpass to go down the shops without being bothered by hoodies, which lends the whole proceeding a bathetic final note that it could well have done without.