Green Zone (15) (From The Northern Echo)

Green Zone (15)

11:54am Thursday 11th March 2010 in

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Stars: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleason, Jason Isaacs, Khalid Abdalla.

114 mins

★★★★

MAKING a movie about the search for WMDs – that’s weapons of mass destruction – is a tough challenge but one that director Paul Greengrass and Hollywood star Matt Damon face head on.

If the result will inevitably be dubbed Bourne Goes To Iraq, it’s an intelligent blending of action thriller and real life issues.

Greengrass employs the same handheld camera approach to the action scenes – and in some ways Green Zone is one long action scene punctuated by the occasional dialogue – that can cause seasickness but lends a truth and urgency to the movie.

Damon is chief warrant officer Roy Miller, despatched with a team of army inspectors to Baghdad in 2003. What they find aren’t weapons but an elaborate cover-up. They’re at the mercy of operatives from agencies with differing agendas, which only serve to complicate rather than clarify the mission.

They include Greg Kinnear’s defence intelligence agent, Brendan Gleesons’s CIA man and Jason Isaacs as a special forces operative threatening to destroy the entire mission.

Oh yes, there’s a journalist too, Amy Ryan’s Wall Street Journal writer, who’s playing a dangerous game too to get the story first. And on a personal level, Miller gets too close to Khalid Abdalla as the Iraqi civilian who acts as his translator.

Greengrass’s taut direction and Brian Helgeland’s tight script do a great job at making Green Zone both action-packed and intelligent, something of a rarity in movies but nothing less than we’d expect from the Bourne team.