Green Zone

Green Zone represents a leap of faith on the part of Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon, who believe that the audience for the Bourne trilogy will be just as keen on a film with the same star, the same action quotient and the same kinetic camerawork, but set in the real world within a contemporary miltary and political framework. Damon plays Miller, a soldier in the "green zone" in Iraq, where US intelligence has told the army they will find Saddam Hussein's much trumpeted weapons of mass destruction.

Miller is not a cynical type, and so feels completely undermined upon undertaking yet another hazardous mission to capture a supposed WMD site only to find what is manifestly a poorly resourced toilet factory. He begins to ask questions, which plunge him into a world of confusion and conspiracy, mainly revolving around finding out where the clearly bad intelligence has come from, who commissioned it, and why it is now being covered up.

Greengrass and Damon more or less deliver on their promise to the action-fan contingent - frequent scuffles punctuate Miller's spiraling journey down the rabbit hole. Damon's character is a pretty likeable chap, even though he's given very little to work with by the script. But given that this is a film based on the theory that you can make action films with a serious foundation, it's a shame that it isn't better. The whole thing feels a little too responsible to be much fun, yet too shallow to be properly insightful about Iraq. Perhaps because it is not based explicitly on a true event in the way that, say, Greengrass' admirable United 93 was, the storytelling loses something of the visceral outrage, despite the fact that most of the events that unfold could be and/or are true. Certainly the supporting players are shortchanged by one of the most generic collections of secondary characters we've seen in some time.