GREEN ZONE (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Paul Greengrass
Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson,
Amy Ryan, Khalid Abdalla, Igal Naor
In a story ripped from yesterday's headlines, Matt Damon plays Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, a skilled career soldier stuck with the frustrating job of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. As the sites he's checking out keep turning up empty, it becomes clear to Miller that the intelligence he's getting is just no good. When his superiors up the chain of command give him the runaround, he gets suspicious and does a little investigating on his own. Where Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" was scrupulously apolitical, this movie dives right into the politics of the war to tell its story. The result is an intense, fast-paced action thriller, escapist entertainment that actually leaves you with something to think about. In the gallery of corrupt and compromised characters, the stand-ins for Judith Miller and Achmed Chalabi are hard to miss.
