Green Zone Review

Posted by Erik Luers on 03.12.2010

Always stop on red.....

Matt Damon... Miller
Greg Kinnear... Clark Poundstone
Amy Ryan... Lawrie Dayne
Brendan Gleeson... Martin Brown
Khalid Abdalla... Freddy









A film focused primarily on a political sleight of hand, Paul Greengrass' Green Zone treads the PC waters ever so lightly (and safely) through the neverending Iraq War via a 2003 setting run rampant with paranoia. With kinetic action and a social conscience, one could say that Greengrass was eager to make an entertaining mainstream movie with a moral center; hello art, meet commerce. On one level, the film plays as an anti-Bush movie in an anti-Bush moviegoing era — think Michael Moore politics converging with Hurt Locker aesthetics. On another, it serves as a mystery/thriller that was never all that mysterious to begin with. Spoiler alert: there were no weapons of mass destruction out there for our soldiers to find. Green Zone plays as if, in a 2010 world (or 2009, when the film was originally set for release), we still aren't sure of whether or not there were any WMDs in our midst. The movie may have appeared taboo in the year in which it's set, but now it feels like too little, too late. The army used to be interested in recruiting people to fight the anonymous faces on the outside, but now they need men to stop in-house corruption. Stripped to its core, Green Zone is a fancy public service announcement shoot em up.

The first half of the film is where Greengrass hits his stride. Following a determined, gung ho WMD unit, the viewer is placed alongside Pvt. (or is it Lt.?) Miller (Matt Damon) and his crew as they attempt to find the prize by any means necessary. One early battle involves a confrontation with a sniper hiding above the men in an abandoned building. Our GI Joes stay low and keep their guns high, eventually shooting the sniper and putting an end to the Full Metal Jacket parallels. Once inside the building, the men discover that there are no WMDs to confiscate. Over and over again, the men are given orders to go to specific locations and retrieve the weapons, but they keep coming up short. Who the hell is giving them these leads? Is their mission sort of like the war: a red herring designed to divert the attention of the American people? Or are these haystacks too darn large in which to find a needle?

The leads are questioned daily by Miller, but no one seems to be listening (when he brings up the issue in a meeting, he's told that it's not for him to question. Suspicious, no?). It turns out that one of the suits (played by the appropriately devilish Greg Kinnear) is getting the WMD information from a man by the code name Magellan. Here's the catch: no one can speak or meet with Magellan except for Clark Poundstone (Kinnear's character). That's a little odd. Who is Magellan and why is he giving out copious amounts of information? And why can only one man gain access to him? How come no one else knows who this overly secluded character truly is? If you already have a theory, you're ten steps ahead of the movie. A reporter for The Wall Street Journal wants to get to the bottom of this (Amy Ryan plays her like a very trusting intern), and Miller may prove to be her willful accomplice (although thankfully not her cliched love interest). An 80s action movie with a dash of Alan J. Pakula ensues.

Brian Helgeland's script includes an intriguing supporting character by the name of Freddy, a local man with a prosthetic leg and an inkling to help American soldiers. He claims to have some information for the men, but one mustn't let their guard down too fast now. His role in the film starts us off with some doubt, and we are meant to question his intentions early on. Very early on. Within five minutes, we might as well chalk him up as a good guy, as we begin to realize that his inclusion in the story will serve as nothing more than a “not all Iraqis are bad” plot point. When we see how helpful he is in comparison to Miller's own allies (a helicopter comes down and a fight between Miller and some red-blooded Americans dressed in fatigues breaks out over the whereabouts of a black book), Freddy looks like the poster child for world peace. Miller's reliance on him feels phoney, and we get the feeling that Mr. Greengrass is using Freddy to characterize and soften up our always cautious American protagonist. Oh, and lest I forget, Freddy's final action (and lines of dialogue) in the film is too conveniently preachy to be taken seriously, discarding his character with a bogus sense of nationalism. Freddy, you finally start trusting the American people, and then they put you in a role like this.

Some moments slide into self-parody, although whether or not they are intentional is up for you to decide. Brendan Gleeson plays Martin Brown, a man who just wants the truth, and enlists Miller to go out and get it for him. Brown and Poundstone hate each other, you see, and a schoolyard rivalry (on a much larger scale) seems to be at the the core of their political agendas; when Brown uncovers too much information, Poundstone tries to shut his operations down. A constant foil in the government's shady dealings, Gleeson has to spout out lines such as “don't be naive!” when Miller expresses trust in his superiors. These scenes aren't played for laughs, but something feels off about them.

One funny moment involves a cameo by George W. Bush presented on a television screen. See how safe and peaceful he makes everything sound as chaos ensues outside on the Iraqi grounds. To the men and women watching him on TV, the president inspires confidence. In Green Zone, Bush takes on an Orwellian “Big Brother is watching” presence, and the suckers that fall for it are either with him or foolishly believe to be. On my way out of the theater, I overheard someone describing the film as being a "liberal fantasy". But no, it appears to be mocking the liberal mindset and democratizing an impending revolution.

2009 brought us the definitive Iraq War movie in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, a film which abandoned the politics in order to capture the physical, on site, visceral experience. Locker was about war, the act of it, while Greengrass' film seems to be about what war creates, with societies in shambles and misplaced power and commerce run amuck. Both are action films, but Bigelow's work doesn't bite off more than it can chew. Green Zone climaxes with a big action finale that feels preposterously out of place; like standard movietown fare, the good guy and bad guy will run and run and run as the other supporting characters get blown to bits and conveniently set up a showdown between good and evil (or in this case, good and kinda not so good). The elaborate balls to the wall action sequence is well staged (with rocket launchers and burning helicopters in tow), but why does it seem to fizzle and run out of steam so quickly? Things blow up, people run around, protagonist catches up to antagonist, and oversimplification is the name of the game. I zoned out quite a bit during this sequence, and if it weren't for the person in front of me who kept hitting me with his chair, I would've lost interest altogether. In Green Zone, action counts for very little.

You may recall Ridley Scott's film from a few years back, Body of Lies, which followed two men who created a fictional terrorist organization in order to scare the real powers that be. The film was equipped with a clever, “what if” scenario that wasn't meant to be taken too seriously. Green Zone draws similar parallels, but it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It depicts an American government as corrupt and out to kill, and then gives us a main character who is trying to put a stop to it. He's an army all to himself, a true American hero. The film points the finger at us and then praises a common man's courage to revolt. Who is criticizing what? The film ends on a falsely optimistic note, relying on one man's ability to send out a mass email that will supposedly change the world. Now that Reuters can use this man's information to announce the truth, all is right with society. How's that for propaganda?

The 411: Green Zone starts off with a lot of potential and then putters out of steam. The Iraq War movie genre is a tricky one to conquer, and Greengrass tries to please the masses with explosions while throwing in a little spare food for thought. The result is uneven. The performances are fine, but our actors appear to be playing symbols and not necessarily fully realized characters. What gives? Why does the film's political agenda seem to keep getting in the way of telling an emotionally inspiring story? The film plays like a recruitment video, inspiring today's American youth to clean up yesterday's American scum. This one is standard fare.

Final Score:  6.0   [ Average ]