“Green Zone” (2010)
I went into Green Zone with middling expectations, and left feeling like I’d watched a good, but not great film. This effort by director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon has nowhere near the brains and energy of the Bourne trilogy, which I love. An Army soldier becomes disillusioned when he and his team can’t find the WMDs their bosses tell them are there. He works with a reporter and a CIA (Brendan Gleeson, whose American accent is too thin for the role) and against a duplicitous goverment official. While the story moves among groups of people, including the Iraqis, it never quite manages to be as complex as I wished it were, though that might have been sacrificed for the clarity of the story. An overlong and oddly not-intense firefight at the end didn’t help. Politically conservative viewers, and supporters of the war in Iraq, should not watch this. But I’m not sure those who questioned the war effort are the ideal audience, either, since that would be like preaching to the converted. It did make me want to re-watch Black Hawk Down.