Movie Review: GREEN ZONE

It is kind of impossible to talk about GREEN ZONE without comparing it to (or even calling it) a Bourne movie. Paul Greengrass directed the second and third installments of the Bourne trilogy, and Matt Damon is wildly recognizable as the amnesiac super-spy.

The Bourne movies were also, well, damn good movies. Jason Bourne is THE action-hero of early 21st century, post-9/11 America. He's an unstoppable bad ass, but he's also a kind of personification of the damage the War On Terror has done to America's idea of itself: haunted by horrible deeds he doesn't even remember, hunted by former bosses who now see him as a liability, he's something that must have looked like such a good idea on paper that it was worth breaking a few rules to make it happen, only for unintended consequences to turn Mission Accomplished into a clusterfuck. Bourne is damaged goods, and Matt Damon, to his credit, never let us forget it.

If there is something driving Roy Miller (Matt Damon)'s hunger for the truth besides sheer decency, we don't find out what it is, but that's alright, Damon is more then capable of grabbing us and just pulling us along for the ride. In fact the entire cast is spot on, which is not just good, but vital with a script this thinly written. Many characters are stand-ins for real people, painted in broad strokes, but it's still interesting to watch Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), the Judy Miller-styled reporter who's face lights up when she recalls how this high ranking official put the raw intel right in her hand, like it was one of the happiest days of her life. Brandon Gleeson radiates a kind of deep intelligence as Miller's CIA ally, who also carries the deeply held delusion that the truth matters.

Greg Kinear doesn't have a gesture or glance to spare as the Paul Bremer administration goon, who is so fixated on the Political victory that he just plain doesn't see the human cost of the choices he makes. When Miller eventually uses his fists to try and beat some sense into him, it's about as close to a comeuppance as this character gets.

The Iraqi casting is also impeccable. Khalid Abdulla plays the one-legged Iran/Iraq war veteran "Freddy" as a haunted, conflicted figure who strives to remind everyone that nobody, not even well-intentioned Miller, really understands Iraq. Yigal Naor, who played Saddam himself in a BBC docu-drama and plays Iraq's top general here, radiates the kind of quiet, iron-handed command that might actually be able to hold a country together.

This is really as pulse-pounding as action-thrillers get. You'll find the same hand-held camera shots, frenzied pace, and incredible chase sequences that you found in the last two Bourne movies, proving again that Paul Greengrass is a director who can make even "person reading an e-mail" seem full of kinetic energy. He might be physically incapable of shooting something dull. The quieter scenes are not so much quiet as eerie. He portrays the Green Zone as a kind of surreal island. The scene where our battle-clad soldiers barge in on a relaxed, beer-swilling pool party is jarring. That's the gap between the people who give the orders and the people who carry them out, and that's why the righteous intentions of the men on the ground are foredoomed to failure. It's hard to get worked up about such hypotheticals as bloody civil war when your beer is cold and you've got a reputation to protect.

A lot has been made of the politics of this movie, but even with it's rooted-in-reality screen credit, the plot of the movie is very clearly the plot of a movie: it puts one man at the center of all the action, gives him the drive to solve the mystery, and brings it all to a kind-of victorious conclusion...kind of. Of course you can't escape history, and as we all know the mess Iraq turned into, we settle for the sort of watered-down victory we get. Miller gets through Iraq with his morality intact. This, it turns out, is as much as can really be hoped for.

I think when current American cinema is writen about in retrospect, GREEN ZONE will turn out to be a significant movie. It's not the best film anyone's made about the Iraq War, but it's a director and a lead actor using all the tricks they've learned from the wildly successful Bourne films to make a real-world point. I hope this won't be Matt Damon's last collaboration with Greengrass. These two get eachother, and for all it's flaws, this is one of the most tightly constructed thrillers you'll see.

It's a damn good movie. I don't know if I've mentioned that enough. A damn good movie.