A little to the left...

Green Zone
Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Jason Isaacs
Director: Paul Greengrass
Rating: *** a half (out of 5)

Summary: Chief Roy Miller heads up a team looking for WMDs in Iraq after invasion in 2003 and finds nothing but empty factories and holes in the ground. There must be something wrong with the intel the search teams are recieving from their own government and Miller is determined to find out what that is...

With two action packed Bourne films to his name, audiences were most likely unaware of Paul Greengrass's political film past, but films such as Bloody Sunday and the recent Oscar nominated United 93 demostrate the ability he has to build excitement, fear and tension with a realistic aesthetic built on handheld HD cameras and a heart pounding percussion soundtrack. Green Zone continues this evolution of "Greengrass the auteur" as he takes his combination of action and cinema verite and fuses them together effortlessly to create a thought provoking thrill ride.

With this chaos of miltary occupation in 2003 raining over the audience with every twist, turn and shake of the screen, Greengrass turns to Bourne stalwart Matt Damon to provide a strong point of moral reference. Damon's casting as Chief Roy Miller is inspired rather than pure nepotism with his all American boy scout good looks and earnest gait betraying the cliched image of the modern American "grunt" who takes orders like a 2 star dimwit at their favourite outlet of McDonalds.

Whilst the intelligent Damon manages to convey the shock and anger felt by the public majority whilst convincingly having the strength to ignore his peers and government to expose the truth, his counter point is Greg Kinnear's Clark Poundstone - as slippery as an Iraqi oil field and as sociopathic as Patrick Bateman. A politician with a hint of travelling salesman, he commodifies and packages democracy for the Middle East without any care to rules, regulations or innocent lives.

After initially being cast as romantic leads in films such as Sabrina, Nurse Betty and Dear God, Kinnear has become the go to guy in Hollywood if you want a convincing portrayal of two faced scum. He looks like butter wouldn't melt but he would sell your Grandmother, your Grandad and at least half of your most loved cousins for a slither of that blood tinged Iraqi black gold.

Unfortunately the two leads are so strong that other characters are not afforded much screentime and are therefore a mixed, underwritten bag. Brendan Gleeson's cynical CIA agent who has seen it all before could have a movie in his own right, whereas Jason Isaacs wears his moustache like its the monstrous, attention seeking trait of a sub standard Bond villain rather than the action equal of Damon.

Just when the film is hurtling towards a thrilling and entralling conclusion it hits a speedbump, as Greengrass and screenwriter Bryan Helgeland handle the journey of Amy Ryan's journalist from naive government stooge to morally horrified whistle blower with the subtlety of a Jason Isaacs rifle butt to the head. It smacks of a liberal media apologist agenda which fits uneasily in the indignatious tone of the rest of the film.

Green Zone can sometimes feel like two hours of liberal lecturing but its serves as an important historic footnote in the war movie genre and as a timely reminder of the murky rational behind war in Iraq. The traditional lines between good and evil are being constantly drawn in the Baghdad sand only to be brushed over again with the stroke of Greg Kinnear's pen or a shot from Special Forces brut Jason Isaacs rifle. There is no moral code in this war, simply the strong preying on the weak. The law of the playground enforced at the barrel of a gun.