Saturday, March 27, 2010

A mini-movie review: Green Zone (2010)


Green Zone (2010)

Director - Paul Greengrass
115 min; R
Cast
Miller - Matt Damon
General Al Rawi - Yigal Naor
Clark Poundstone - Greg Kinnear
Martin Brown - Brendan Gleeson
Freddy - Khalid Abdalla

I’ll admit I was wary of seeing this film, thinking it would be the equivalent of a Bourne-movie spin-off (though I do like the Bourne movies) and having director Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon together only hardened that pre-viewing opinion. Fortunately I did go, and though this is not exactly a film that will stand out to me 10 years from now, I think it did the trick.

To sum up this movie: Matt Damon as a US soldier uncovers evidence that the war on Iraq took place with the US government at least partially aware that weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) were definitely non-existent. Greg Kinnear and Brendan Gleeson are the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ of this potential conspiracy, and both do a pretty good job.

This is an ‘imagining’ of what could have happened, though some do believe that something like this actually did happen, and I think the premise works fine. The film does not beat us over the head with a lot of politics about what did or did not happen – it simply is an action-war film. In a year when the Hurt Locker made all the headlines Green Zone does just fine to entertain us in ways which that film did not – ‘fake’ war action that is entertaining.

*** out of 5

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