DVDs in Review

Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010)

Title: Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010)

Release date: July 19 2010

Certificate: 15

Format: Blu-ray

RRP: £24.99

Rating: 4/5

Reviewed by Dave Lancaster

Reuniting Matt Damon with the director of the last two Jason Bourne thrillers, Paul Greengrass, is no doubt the reason why this risky project got greenlit for a major studio release. Set in Baghdad during the early days of the Iraq war, it tells of a warrant officer named Miller (Damon) who is getting increasingly frustrated with the false intelligence being sent his way as he tries to track down the famously elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The film makes a case that the searches are a scam; nothing is really there when the Americans go in guns blazing, taking casualties in the process. Instead of just being an action packed wild goose chase, ‘Green Zone’ bridges the gap between the soldiers in the warzone and the suits firing off misinformation to cover their tracks, with Miller going rogue working with a CIA operative (Brendan Gleeson) to uncover the truth.

Greg Kinnear also features as an intelligence agent who is happy to let these WMDs slip through the army’s fingers if the US can get a solid foothold in taking over the nation. Rounding out another perspective is a newspaper reporter (Amy Ryan) whose ‘source’ she is beginning to suspect. There’s also a local snitch named Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), helping out Miller as a translator, and General Al Rawi (Igal Naor) of the Iraqi army waiting to make a deal with the Americans, not wanting to fight unless the occupying Americans disband his army and force him to.

There are a lot of characters here, many with increasingly disparate motivations keeping them on the run, but this isn’t a hard film to follow. The screenwriter here is Brian Helgeland, whose best scripts involve the clashes between multiple characters to provide the story’s thrills instead of typical action scenes. He’s the man who penned ‘Mystic River’ and ‘L.A. Confidential’, and with ‘Green Zone’ he resorts to typecasting and a relentless series of plot points to keep its pace up.

We find out very little about the backstories of the characters, but in a way that only adds to the realism. How much is really known about the army men and politicians who report about a war’s ‘progress’ on the news? Like Damon’s character, we’re being given segments of a bigger picture. Rank dictates your knowledge in this situation. Greengrass follows this formula of dripping out narrative points as he goes along, keeping his scenes brief and vital before cutting away to a different angle on the story to continuously slow us the bigger picture.

Greengrass’ kinetic handheld camera direction (which kept audiences queasy during the ‘Bourne’ films) here has a documentary-like, almost real-time feel. His quick moving camera allows the audience to digest a lot of detail such as the subtle differences in costume of the characters - Damon’s clean army outfit, Kinnear’s completely impractical dark businessman attire and Gleeson’s CIA man bridging the gap between bureaucrat and grunt by hovering in the middle with a creased tan jacket and open collar shirt.

Ridley Scott’s ‘Body of Lies’, a similar film involving misinformation and international intrigue in Jordan, was stronger throughout and developed an intriguing character bond between Leonardo DiCaprio’s dogged terrorist hunter and Russell Crowe’s lazy CIA boss back in America casually feeding him orders in-between phone calls and dropping his kids off at school. This film wisely severs the link back to the States and gives more screen time to Iraq military men on the run, trying to find a stake in their own country while misinformation encircles them.

‘Green Zone’ is very well made, but it’s hard to invest in any of the characters because they’re painted so thinly and the plot relies on too many coincidences. When the third act culminates in a footchase involving half of the principle cast all turning up in the same desolate place, it all feels a bit too tidy.

Ultimately, ‘Green Zone’ remains engaging thanks to its blend of fact and fiction, and comes off as being preachy and thrilling in equal measure without adding clichés like half-baked romance subplot for the sake of it. Just don’t go in expecting Bourne in Baghdad.