Master director Paul Greengrass’ “Green Zone” reunites him with Matt Damon for what’s essentially another Jason Bourne thriller that entertainingly — if sometimes uneasily — mixes fact and speculation in a way that’s already raised the ire of some on the right as well as on the left.
Damon is playing an Army chief warrant officer charged with finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) shortly after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Only his unit — like all of the other American soldiers — finds nothing in any of the sites he’s been ordered to search.
Ignoring the chain of command, Damon’s character decides to personally investigate why he’s been given bad intelligence.
Encounters with a fed-up CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson) and a naive reporter (Amy Ryan) lead him to suspect that a slimy Defense Department official (Greg Kinnear) cooked the WMD reports to support the Bush administration’s decision to invade.
This sends our hero in search of a Baathist general who supposedly told the official there were no WMD — and offered to cut a deal with the US, which instead dissolved the Iraqi army.
Arguably the most expert action director working today, Greengrass offers a series of pulse-pounding chases as Damon pursues the general. All the while, he is being chased by a Special Forces unit, which has orders to take Damon out before he exposes the truth.
The first Iraq war movie to hit theaters after “The Hurt Locker” won the Best Picture Oscar certainly doesn’t soft-pedal its liberal politics the way that movie does.
My colleague Kyle Smith, writing an opinion column in The Post earlier this week, condemned “Green Zone” as a “slander” against America.
With all due respect, the politics of this US-UK-French co-production distributed by Universal (whose parent company is the major defense contractor GE) are as incoherent as “The Kingdom,” a right-leaning war fantasy released by the same studio in 2007.
From a liberal point of view, the Brian Helgeland script, “inspired” by a nonfiction book, wimps out by failing to name real names, quite possibly because of legal considerations.
Ryan’s character, who writes for the Wall Street Journal, is a thinly disguised version of controversial New York Times reporter Judith Miller, while Kinnear is clearly based on Paul Bremer, the American official charged with reorganizing the Iraqi government.
I don’t think any of this is going to matter to most audiences.
Greengrass, who also directed the superb docudrama “United 93,” effectively employs US veterans to play soldiers in the exciting action sequences, some of the best of their kind since “Black Hawk Down.”
Politics aside and purely as a piece of genre moviemaking, “Green Zone” is a solid example of a political paranoia thriller.