DVDFile

Matt Damon has, within the course of a few short years, become the De Niro to Paul Greengrass' Scorsese. All but one of Greengrass' Hollywood films have starred the Good Will Hunting alum, and their collaboration is, at its very least, exciting to watch. Damon has found a sober, bravely stoic quality to his on-screen presence in his last few films (even The Informant!), and Greengrass' ability to capture this with his ever-staccato nausea-cam hand-held cameras is second to none.

We get full-blown proof of this in Green Zone, because even with the movie's $100 million+ budget and arid-scary panoramas of the Iraqi desert in plain view, Greengrass' and Damon's on-screen waltz is all the film has going for it. In short, Green Zone is a mess, one with anti-war intentions that boil with fervor from frame one to end credits, but none that benefit in any real way, shape or form from the film's herky-jerky narrative construction. There was a lot of thought and political effort that went into making a film this big with messages like these, but in constructing this suspenseful piece of anti-war propaganda, the dudes forgot to make a good movie.

In a nutshell, Green Zone follows Roy Miller (Damon), an officer who is sent to Iraq to locate and confirm the existence of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction). I don't know if you've heard this, but it turns out that the rumors of WMDs in post-9/11 Iraq have been greatly exaggerated, and once Miller finds this out, the trickle-down becomes increasingly intense. A CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson), a Pentagon higher-up (Greg Kinnear), a journalist (Amy Ryan) - these are the comrades with whom Miller must come to the realization that his presence (and his army's) is not what it seems.

This seems like rich territory for a politically-minded war suspense thriller (I can see somebody like Oliver Stone really digging his fangs into it), but Green Zone falters early and stays limp to its end. The movie is a swirl of concepts and partisan political push, but it lacks a heart - it lacks a center. The Damon/Greengrass express stills runs at a fine speed here, but Green Zone ends up doing nothing save showcasing their cinematic affinity against a backdrop of dull wartime mumbo jumbo.

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