In a sentenceA thriller whose big reveal was in the newspapers seven years before it opened
Baghdad, spring 2003, a few weeks after the invasion. Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) leads an army team sent to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, working from a list of sites supplied by intelligence. Each site is empty; one turns out to be a toilet factory. Miller says so at a briefing and is told to keep digging. The intelligence comes through Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), a Pentagon official based in the palace inside the Green Zone, and reached the public through the reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), who printed it on the word of a single unnamed source. Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), the CIA’s man in Baghdad, has his own doubts. Then Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), an Iraqi with a prosthetic leg, walks up to Miller’s unit with news of a meeting of Saddam’s generals a few streets away.
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Paul Greengrass drops Matt Damon into Baghdad in the spring of 2003 and shakes the camera until the city feels real. As a war film it is vivid and well made; as an argument it tells us what we already knew, and loudly.
Paul Greengrass goes to Baghdad in the spring of 2003, a few weeks after the invasion, and takes his camera with him into the back of the truck. Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) leads a team sent to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction from a list of sites, and the sites are empty. One is a toilet factory. He raises the matter at a briefing and is told the intelligence is solid and his job is to keep digging. Green Zone is a thriller about a man working out what everyone watching already knows, and the surprise is how much tension Greengrass gets from that before it runs out.
The first half hour is the film at its best. Barry Ackroyd shoots the opening raid handheld on long lenses, so the crane towers over the street, soldiers crouch behind a looted car, a sniper fires from a roof, and the whole thing ends at a locked door with nothing behind it. Christopher Rouse cuts it in short, overlapping pieces, each shot lasting about as long as it takes to notice something, which is how it felt to us: hard to follow and impossible to look away from. When Miller gets inside and finds dust, the let-down is physical. We felt the anger in it, and it is the strongest feeling the film gives us.
Dominic Watkins builds two cities. One is the palace inside the Green Zone, with a swimming pool full of contractors, pizza boxes, a bar and a big screen playing the President saying the fighting is over. The other is outside the wire: shuttered shops, burnt cars, checkpoints where crowds shout at soldiers who cannot understand them. Sammy Sheldon dresses Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) in pressed chinos and a polo shirt and the CIA’s Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) in a jacket that has been slept in, and you know which man the film trusts before either speaks.
Damon plays Miller as a decent, blunt man who has never had to think about where orders come from and does not enjoy starting. It is a good, plain performance, and it carries the film. Kinnear is smooth and plausible, the kind of official who asks to be trusted and means it. Gleeson is worn and funny. Amy Ryan is given the reporter Lawrie Dayne, who printed the weapons stories on a single unnamed source, and then given almost nothing to do with her. Jason Isaacs grows a goatee and a drawl as the special forces major Briggs and enjoys himself more than anyone. The best performance is Khalid Abdalla’s. His Freddy, an Iraqi with a prosthetic leg who walks up to Miller’s unit with information and asks for nothing, is the one character whose wants the film does not already know, and the scene where he tells Miller what the Americans do not understand about his country is the only one we would watch again.
Then the plot takes over. Brian Helgeland and Rajiv Chandrasekaran share the writing credit, and the script they have made is a chase: Miller wants to find an Iraqi general, Poundstone wants him found first, Brown wants him alive, and the film runs between them for an hour. The second half takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that the turn was a headline years before the film opened and the film treats it as a bombshell. Somewhere in the last forty minutes we noticed we were being told something, in capital letters, that we had come in believing, and we stopped feeling anything and started nodding. Being lectured in agreement is a strange experience; it is not a thrilling one.
Against Greengrass’s own standard it falls short. United 93 (2006) put the camera in a cabin and let the event happen; The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) did the running and never pretended it meant anything. Green Zone wants both at once, and the running keeps interrupting the politics. The long night chase through the streets at the end is cut so fast we lost Miller twice, and John Powell’s score, all pulse and low brass, drives it on past the point where we knew where it was going.
Watch it at home, where Ackroyd’s camera settles and the lectures can be talked over. It is 115 minutes, a 15, and it is a good war thriller for an hour and a sound editorial for the rest.
Most critics come down on the film’s side, though not by a wide margin. The praise gathers around Greengrass’s handling of Baghdad in the weeks after Saddam’s fall: the reviews single out the chaos on the ground, the urgency of the action and the way locations in Spain, Morocco and the UK pass for Iraq. Several find the thriller gripping, and Matt Damon’s grounded lead is noted more than once.
The reservations cluster on the join between the politics and the chase. Some critics think the message is blunt and preachy; others think the suspense plot is contrived and resolves too neatly for the real events behind it. The shaky camera draws complaints from more than one quarter, with Slant finding the climactic chase incoherent. The spread is wide, from the Evening Standard’s admiration to The Wrap and Slant calling it a misfire, and the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw rates it below Greengrass’s earlier work.
The critic calls Green Zone a thrilling, morally complex addition to the best war films. They especially praise Khalid Abdalla’s performance and Greengrass’s energetic direction and ethical curiosity.
Read the full review →The critic calls it a remarkable film, praising its energetic, urgent action. He singles out Greengrass and his team for making locations in Spain, Morocco and the U.K. feel like a chaotic Iraq.
Read the full review →Turan finds the film daring, highly entertaining, and nearly successful, though its final sections lose some of their earlier balance. He praises Greengrass’s vivid rendering of Iraq’s chaos and the film’s willingness to engage with the moral complexities of the war.
Read the full review →Johnston finds the film delivers high-octane entertainment. He praises its startling immediacy in depicting the chaos after Saddam’s fall.
Read the full review →Smith finds Green Zone an expertly orchestrated, gripping war-zone thriller. He praises its breathless action and complex intrigue, especially the way Miller’s pursuit is driven by indignation at being misled.
Read the full review →Dinning finds it an honest, compelling and smart blockbuster that balances political substance with exciting action. He praises Matt Damon’s grounded performance, while faulting the film for flattening the Iraq conflict’s moral ambiguity.
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The Hurt LockerAckroyd’s camera again, in the same war, with the politics left outside the frame.
Three KingsThe first Gulf War as a heist, funnier and angrier than this one.
The Battle of AlgiersAn occupation filmed from the street up, and still the standard everyone is chasing.
Syriana · not reviewed yetOil, intelligence and the Gulf, with the plot deliberately harder to follow.
Bloody SundayGreengrass before the budgets, one day in Derry, the handheld method at its purest.
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