The Actual Story Would Have Been Better

Rating: 5/10 (2 June 2013)

Like "The French Connection", this movie is based on a book of real events, but the movie itself is a fictionalization. Also like "The French Connection", a movie based on the actual story would have been so much better.
I heard of the movie before, but finally rented it when I read the book "The World's Worst Weapons" and it mentioned that the US military really has used the idea of psychic warfare to try to fight enemies. The movie did show a soldier staring at a goat and supposedly killing it, and how goats were used in real life to train surgeons to dress combat wounds.
The movie does have some laughs; the general running into a wall, Cassady looking at a cloud while driving and using his mental powers to disperse a cloud-and crashing into a rock because he wasn't paying attention to his driving. But the storyline is mostly weird and confusing, and it would have been better if it has kept up with the suggestion (in the scene where the kidnappers had locked up the reporter and Cassady) that the psychic soldiers' "powers" were really just the deception and trickery used in stage magic. Interesting to see once.