History gets rewritten in Green Zone, an action picture set in Iraq with a plot that hinges on weapons of mass destruction.
What we have here is inane poppycock dressed up as incomprehensible codswallop. The story suggests that one good soldier discovered there were no such weapons in Iraq, and then he single-handedly went up against the corrupt influences in the American armed forces. You could choke on your popcorn, watching this nonsense.
Matt Damon stars in Green Zone as Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller. He and his unit in Baghdad are charged with locating and dismantling those weapons of mass destruction that President George W. Bush kept talking about, but every time they move into an alleged storage site, they find nothing. No weapons. No chemicals. Nada. And not just nothing, but evidence that nothing was ever there in the first place.
Miller’s first question is, where is this faulty information coming from?
He asks a few hard questions and gets shut down. As for his weapon-hunting assignment, a colleague points out, “All they want is something they can hold up on CNN.” Now our man Miller is even more suspicious. A CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson) tells him not to be naive. Greg Kinnear turns up to represent all that’s wrong with the American presence in Iraq in the role of Clark Poundstone, a glib government liar. That might be redundant. Amy Ryan plays a reporter from the Wall Street Journal who can’t imagine why the government might feed her incorrect information.
Against this background of falsehoods and confusion, Miller meets up, by chance, with an Iraqi citizen (Khalid Abdalla) who wants him to know that he has seen various big guns from the old regime meeting in a a secret location. Before you know it, Miller has stumbled into a big, fat conspiracy involving corruption in high places and a certain General Al Rawi (Igal Naor), who holds the key to the whole mess.
So what’s required, as you might expect when Matt Damon and Bourne director Paul Greengrass get together, is plenty of running and shooting and cliff-hanging moments, and many of them in the dark, to boot.
As an old fashioned shoot-’em-up, a sort of Western set in the Middle East, Green Zone has enough tense, explosive action to please fans of the Bourne franchise. As always, Matt Damon is believable — even when surrounded by guys in black hats and white hats — but there’s almost no tension around his decision to defy his superiors and go rogue, or whatever the appropriate term is when a soldier takes the entire future of an entire country into his own hands. It’s tiring just thinking about how stupid this movie is.
What’s scary is that kids will see this movie and believe it’s an account of what really happened with those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (OMG! Jason Bourne fought in Iraq???)
Green Zone is very loosely based on the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Washington Post editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran. You might want to pick up the book and skip the film. Just a thought.
(This film is rated R)
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