Green Zone (Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan) – Director Paul Greengrass and actor Matt Damon have chemistry. The two Bourne films that did together are action-in-motion, mile-a-minute films with car chases, cross-continent travel, and rapid edits that keep audiences on the edge of their seats as the frames fly by like Indy cars. The great advantage of the Bourne movies is that its source material – Robert Ludlum’s books – provides a strong blueprint with a logical, if not plausible, plot. Green Zone, while loosely based on a book, presents all of that same action but uses an unproved conspiracy theory as its plot line. As a result, the story purports to put us inside a squad of U.S. Marines looking for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 2003 Iraq while really trying to convince us that elements of the U.S. government invented the case for war.
The film is a little like the stereotyped prom queen who looks great but has no brain. The movie has stunning effects and constant motion. It looks and feel like a Bourne film, including the foreign location. Unlike The Hurt Locker, this one is politically charged. For the first 45 minutes, the action feels real (many of the soldiers are Iraq veterans, not actors), and we have a sense of the danger and disorder of the early stages of the Iraq disaster. We see the agency bickering, primarily the State Department and the CIA as well as within the military between the regular soldiers and Special Forces. The best scene may be the fight between Damon’s character, Chief Roy Miller and the leader of a Special Forces unit. Damon’s unit specializes in WMD but they have come up dry in three different locations, and something is definitely wrong with the intelligence data though his superiors want Miller to quit expressing his concerns. The only person who will listen is Marty Brown (Brendan Gleeson, who never gets the American accent down) at the CIA. Believe it or not, the CIA is portrayed as the good guys. The bad guy is the State Department hack, Clark Poundstone (portrayed by Greg Kinnear, who just doesn’t make it as the evil warmonger), who is charged with putting an American puppet into the leadership among the disjointed Iraqi warring factions.
Miller persists, using an informant to identify one of the top Saddam Hussein generals who seems to hold the key to all of the secrets. Miller goes “off the reservation” and hunts down the general while being undermined by Poundstone and the Special Forces. If you only pay attention to the action, you will love this film. If you allow yourself to wander into the conspiracy theory, you may wonder what happened to a good war movie. Either way, I guarantee you will not be bored.