In cinemas Thursday [M]

Director: Paul Greengrass

Runtime: 114mins

When I heard Matt Damon was going to be teamed up again with Greg Kinnear for another movie, it turned out I was the only one hoping for a sequel to Stuck On You. In fact people were more excited over Matt Damon working with Paul Greengrass after their success on the Bourne Series. In all seriousness though, those of you who have seen Greengrass and Damon’s work previously will know what to expect, Dave Stratton is going to hate this movie.

Based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s non-fiction book, (Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone) the film revolves around Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) who is in Iraq looking for WMD on dodgy Intel. Meanwhile CIA Bureau chief of Baghdad Gordon Brown (Brendan Gleeson) is butting heads with Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) on whether they should enlist the help of a man named Al Rawi (Igal Naor) one of Saddam Hussein’s ex-army chiefs to keep the Iraqi people in control.

Miller, frustrated by his mission of looking for bombs he knows aren’t there, is informed by a local Freddy (Khalid Abdalla) that there are highly armed Iraqi citizens meeting up near their site. Taking the initiative, he tasks a squadron to raid the meeting place only to find that Al Rawi himself was at the meeting, and manages to escape. Brown persuades Miller to be re-assigned in order to catch Rawi so that the government can make a deal. Poundstone on the other hands wants him dead, and sends his own unit to go after Rawi.

If you’ve seen the Bourne movies, you’ll know what to expect, frantic camera work, and talking heads moving at breakneck pace trying to get Matt Damon from point A to B. The action is essentially trivial, it can be followed, but it becomes tiresome to watch. The lightning speed editing suits the film, but it does rob it of any emotional connection it hopes to make with the audience, which is fine as the book was also said to be quite clinical in its description.

Where the film earns its stripes is how the plot is coloured in by some fact, thanks to the source material. It also helps the immersion aspect that this is one of very few Iraq War movies that actually looks like it takes place in central Baghdad.

Green Zone is entertaining for the most part, and it doesn’t hit viewers with a message (which is fairly heartfelt) until the end. Films about the Iraq war have been grossly un-watchable until The Hurt Locker, and this, while not nearly as good, is a step in the right direction.

***

ELWOOD LEE

Comments (2)

Write Comment
Comments are submitted for possible publication on the condition that they may be edited. Poster's IP addresses are logged.
Name:
Comment:
Code:*