Green Zone

Did Matt Damon just make Bourne 4?

By Scott Von Doviak

Green Zone — In hopes of breaking the curse of Iraq-themed movies underperforming at the box office (even your Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker failed to crack the $15 million mark, although that will likely happen now), Universal is selling Green Zone as if it's the fourth Jason Bourne movie. Car chases! Explosions! Greengrass! Damon! The perception created by the ads and trailers is somewhat borne out (no pun intended) by the actual movie, though in truth Green Zone bears more resemblance to a feature-length episode of 24 than either the Bourne movies or its source material, Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

Chandrasekaran's nonfiction book focused on the dysfunctional bureaucracy of Iraq's post-Saddam provisional government. It was less a blueprint for a high-octane action movie than a primer on the administrative blunders that helped pave the way for violent insurgency, but a truly faithful adaptation never would have gotten off the ground in Hollywood (except possibly as an HBO miniseries). Enter Paul Greengrass, director of the last two Bourne movies, along with L.A. Confidential screenwriter Brian Helgeland, a man with experience turning sprawling source material into sleek entertainment.

The third major part of the equation is Matt Damon as fictional warrant officer Roy Miller, tasked with leading his men into war-torn neighborhoods in search of weapons of mass destruction. After coming up empty-handed in several such missions, Miller begins to doubt the source of the intelligence his team is being provided. His suspicions are supported by CIA station chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), who's been butting heads with the Bush administration functionaries running the provisional government, notably the smug, arrogant Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear). Poundstone has helped keep the WMD myth alive by funneling information on an intelligence source to reporter Lawrie Dane (Amy Ryan), a thinly-veiled analogue for New York Times patsy Judith Miller.

Roy Miller's search for that source, even as the president gives his infamous "mission accomplished" speech, becomes an effective ticking-clock thriller in the hands of Greengrass. The pacing is intense without being frenetic, and the chases and gun battles are served up with his trademark jittery fervor. If Green Zone were a comic-book adaptation, everyone might walk away satisfied, but unfortunately there's this whole "reality" factor that taints the proceedings. We get a few glimpses of the movie that could have been, such as the absurd image of government staffers lounging around Saddam's pool while chaos rages outside the walls, but Greengrass and Helgeland mostly rely on self-righteous, showboating speeches to deliver the movie's political message. There's a solid action movie somewhere inside Green Zone, but it's been sabotaged by filmmakers under the impression they're making something much more important.

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