Green Zone is a failed attempt to merge political polemic with action movie blockbuster. The compromise births a movie not sufficiently cerebral and conversely, not dumb enough to be entertaining.
Matt Damon (Bourne Trilogy, The Departed, Invictus) stars as Miller, a patriotic soldier sent to Iraq to uncover WMDs. He leads his team to various locations within Baghdad based on alleged “intelligence”, but finds only dilapidated factories and abandoned warehouses. Miller questions this intelligence but is re-buffed by his superiors. Undeterred, he continues to investigate with the help of Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), an Iraqi civilian/plot convenience. Together they uncover corruption within the U.S. Military and learn that the threat of WMDs was not only non-existent but in fact fabricated by government officials, in particular Clark Poundstone (played by the perennially smarmy Greg Kinnear).
The film does not delve any deeper than this. Director Paul Greengrass (Bourne Trilogy, Bloody Sunday) and writer Brian Helgeland (Mystic River) are content to then launch into the action which sees Miller run around and blow things up, apparently without the permission of any superiors in command. The lack of believability wouldn’t be so grating were it not for the fact that Helgeland based his screenplay on Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s lauded non-fiction account, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. Something must have got lost in the hyperbole of the action, all of which unfurl in Greengrass and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s (The Hurt Locker) signature frenzied style. Greengrass is a skilled director of action, and there are some exhilarating sequences even if much is obscured in the murky digital photography.
Damon gives an efficient and likeable performance as Miller, but there is little he can do with lines such as, “the reasons we go to war are always important!”. Dialogue like this flows hard and fast, with a level of subtlety that would make even Michael Moore blush.
Miller’s quest to find the truth behind the absence of WMDs feels like an attempt to re-position the audience’s view of America in Iraq by giving us a hero who fights for these answers. Quentin Tarantino did something similar recently with Inglorious Basterds.
But Tarantino understood something fundamental that Greengrass doesn’t seem to have taken into account: if you are going to re-write history, at least make it interesting.
Green Zone is currently screening nationally in Australia
Director: Paul Greengrass
Cast: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan
