- UK release: March 2010
- Director: Paul Greengrass · Writer: Brian Helgeland
- Studio / distributor: Universal Pictures; Working Title Films; StudioCanal
- Genre: Political action thriller / military thriller · Runtime: 115 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Matt Damon (The Bourne Supremacy, The Departed) as Roy Miller; Greg Kinnear (As Good as It Gets, Little Miss Sunshine) as Clark Poundstone; Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges) as Martin Brown; Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone) as Lawrie Dayne
- Rotten Tomatoes: 53% critics / 57% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon walk out of the Bourne films and straight into occupied Baghdad, and for a while you would be forgiven for thinking they never left Jason Bourne behind. Green Zone moves with the same handheld urgency, the same trust in a competent man running through a hostile city, the same conviction that the people in charge are lying to him. The difference is that this time the conspiracy is not invented for the screen. The film takes the search for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the search that found nothing, and turns it into a manhunt thriller. It is a bold thing to attempt while the argument is still warm, and the surprise is how well the chase holds even when you know there is nothing at the end of it.
The setup
It is the spring of 2003, days into the occupation. Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) leads an army unit raiding sites that intelligence has flagged as hiding chemical and biological weapons. Site after site comes up empty, a warehouse of pigeon droppings here, a disused toilet factory there, and Miller starts asking the question nobody above him wants asked: where is this intelligence coming from, and why is it always wrong? His curiosity drags him into the space between a slick Pentagon official selling certainty (Greg Kinnear), a veteran CIA man who smells the same rot (Brendan Gleeson), and a Wall Street reporter (Amy Ryan) who has been fed the official line and printed it. What begins as a soldier doing his job becomes a soldier trying to find out who decided the job in the first place.
The cast
Damon is the anchor, and he is very good at the particular thing this film needs: a decent professional whose loyalty curdles into doubt without ever tipping into speech-making. He plays Miller as tired, physical and quietly furious, and the camera trusts his face to carry the turns. Greg Kinnear, an actor who can make smugness charming, weaponises that gift as Poundstone, the man who would rather be right on paper than right on the ground. Brendan Gleeson brings his usual lived-in weariness to the CIA sceptic, the one grown-up in a room of careerists, and the scenes between him and Kinnear are the film’s sharpest, two arms of the same government openly at war. Amy Ryan has the trickiest part, a journalist complicit in the spin, and she keeps the character human rather than a target. Khalid Abdalla, as the Iraqi local caught in the middle, gives the film its conscience and its best single line about whose country this actually is.
The craft
Greengrass directs the way he always does, and either you go with it or you do not. Barry Ackroyd’s camera is restless and close, the night raids are shot in a green wash of military optics, and Christopher Rouse cuts it all at a clip that keeps you slightly off balance without losing the geography. This is more disciplined than the shakiest of the Bourne work; you always know where Miller is and what he wants. John Powell’s score drives the pursuit without drowning it. The final movement, a chase through the dark streets and back alleys of Baghdad with three or four factions all hunting the same man, is a genuinely thrilling piece of action cinema, the sort of sustained physical sequence Greengrass builds better than almost anyone working now. The film looks and sounds like the real thing, which is the point of shooting it this way.
How it stacks up
The obvious reference is The Bourne Supremacy, the same director and star applying the same grammar to a real war, and the comparison flatters and limits the film in equal measure. It has Bourne’s momentum but trades the fantasy for a charge sheet. Set it beside Syriana and Body of Lies and it is the most propulsive of the recent Middle East thrillers, less interested in tangled geopolitics than in one man pulling a single thread until the wall comes down. Against United 93, Greengrass’s own masterpiece of documentary tension, Green Zone is the more conventional film, a thriller wearing the clothes of reportage rather than the other way round. It does not have that film’s terrible restraint, but it has a forward drive that United 93 deliberately denied itself.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are lukewarm, sitting around 53%, with audiences only a little warmer. The recurring complaint is twofold: that the film tells us what most people already believe about the WMD case, and that it wraps that argument in a too-neat action package. Both charges land. The politics are blunt, the villain is a shade too tidy, and the film arrives a few years after the public quarrel it is joining. None of that ruins it for me. A thriller is allowed to have a point of view, and the craft on display is not in question. The reviews read as a verdict on the argument; I am marking the film.
Verdict
This is a smart, muscular, expertly made thriller that happens to be carrying a real grievance, and I rate the craft and the rewatchability higher than the consensus does. The politics may be settled and the shape may be familiar, but the filmmaking is not lazy for a second, and that closing pursuit is one I would happily sit through again. Damon and Greengrass know exactly what they do well together, and they do it here at full stretch. If you want a thinking person’s action film that takes a real subject seriously and still gets the pulse going, this delivers. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Green Zone underperformed at the box office and has settled into the role of an underrated Greengrass entry, the Iraq thriller people forget he made between Bourne films. It marked the end of his run with Damon until they reunited for Jason Bourne (2016). It is now widely available on DVD, Blu-ray and digital, and rotates through the major streaming services depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong language and violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Strong violence occurs during scenes of urban combat including occasional sight of blood when characters are shot. Other scenes feature heavy blows being delivered to the face and body during fights, or as part of an interrogation.
Language: There is frequent use of strong language (‘f**k’).
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
