It’s 2003 in Baghdad. Saddam Hussein has just been ousted from his Imperial Palace stronghold and is in hiding. American forces are frantically searching for WMDs at various high-priority sites, but keep coming up empty. The threat of civil war looms among Iraq’s warring sects. Soon, George W. Bush will famously (and prematurely) announce to the world “Mission Accomplished” – victory in Iraq has been reached. Whatever that means.
This is the setting of Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass’s new flick, Green Zone. The era is a well-known period of uncertainty and tension in recent history, and definitely sets up the potential for a truly riveting film experience.
Sadly, Green Zone is like that burnout you remember from high school: all sorts of potential, but would rather eat Doritos and play Super Nintendo than get off his ass. Actually, what the hell am I talking about? That sounds awesome.
More commonly known for their Bourne series efforts, this dynamic duo have apparently gotten fed up with making suspenseful, gripping, conspiracy-action movies, and instead, have found the prospect of making heavy-handed, politically brow-beating, conspiracy-action(less) movies immensely appealing.
What’s confusing about the mediocrity of this film is that many of the characteristic elements of Greengrass’s fantastic Bourne movies are present (cameraman-on-speed-“reality”-cam, things blowing up, Matt Damon), but this film is hardly of the same calibre. Green Zone is so focused on beating you over the head with its “bad intelligence got us into Iraq” message that it barely bothers with engaging the audience with an exciting story or characters we care about. The trailer makes this seem like a Bourne-esque action film, what with its montage of car chases and firefights, but its ambiguous title hides what is really meant to be a soapbox placed against an action backdrop. Maybe it should have been called “There Were Never Any WMDs: The Movie”: at least then people would know what they’re signing up for.
What the audience gets instead is a film that’s just plain boring. The blandness of the first three quarters of this movie was best summed up by the gentleman one row back, who snored from the first tensionless sniper-standoff until the final anticlimactic parting shot. Maybe he figured $10 was cheaper than a hotel – but I digress.
There are other problems as well. Not having a clear antagonist may reflect the complexity of a real world scenario (where things are rarely black and white) but only further muddies up what is already a fairly generic and dull movie. Additionally, Green Zone‘s cardboard-like characters offer an audience no one to care about, which only leads to apathy-inducing action sequences. When will filmmakers realize that when an audience isn’t invested in a movie’s characters, the threat of them dying means nothing?
It’s not completely bleak, however. Khalid Abdalla offers the sole performance of the film as the believably passionate “Freddy”, but one saving grace is not enough to save this movie. Damon does well enough, but unfortunately, his character plays only one note in this tune.
Save yourself some money and frustration and don’t bother with Green Zone. Instead, rewatch the entire Bourne trilogy and see how an action conspiracy is supposed to go.
