The Thousands

This shaggy comedy is very loosely based on an incredible true story: the US Army’s secret elite squad of Jedi-like psychic warriors. It’s pretty much an excuse for Oscar-nominated actors to clown about like doofuses. Actually, I’ve always preferred George Clooney’s wild-eyed slapstick (Burn After Reading, O Brother Where Art Thou?) to his suave or serious roles. And as "New Earth Army" star operative Lyn Cassady, Clooney strikes a nice balance between wackiness and a touching innocence.

The film shines in some very funny flashback sequences explaining the unit’s history. The Dude abides in Jeff Bridges’s genial Bill Django, the unit’s hippie leader, while Kevin Spacey is unctuous as Larry Hooper, the psychic who crossed over to the ‘dark side’. There’s interpretive dance, LSD experiments, "sparkly eyes technique" and, yes, Boston’s ‘More Than A Feeling’.

However, the overarching narrative following Ewan ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ McGregor’s journalist, Bob Wilton, was the film’s weakest link. McGregor is seemingly only in the film to be a straight man for Lyn and to enable intertextual Star Wars jokes. His journey from skeptic to believer is implausibly swift, and the film’s final scene is risibly lame.