Green Zone - B-

In theaters. Rated R, 115 minutes. Trailer.

War movie, action movie, political thriller, Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass. These ingredients should make at least an A- movie, but alas, the Green Zone just never got there. Damon stars as Miller, a US soldier in Iraq in 2002 just after Baghdad is taken. He is leading one of the groups looking for weapons of mass destruction, but continually comes up empty handed. He begins to question the intelligence he is being fed, leading him to the CIA's Middle Eastern agent (an excellent Brendan Gleeson), the lead American reporter on the war (a fumbling Amy Ryan), and the Bush administration's chief Iraq weasel bureacrat (Greg Kinnear). Click below for more GZ:

As Damon begins to question the intelligence, the film is promising. But then he and Greengrass get bogged down in unnecessary and uninteresting gun battles and nighttime chases that ruin the movie. The movie mostly steers clear of too much bashing, laying the blame equally on the Bush administration and Judith Miller, the real life reporter former NY Times reporter that botched the WMD story by printing the Bush administration's assertions without enough questioning (Amy Ryan's character). I too wonder how we got it as wrong as we did and this film provides somewhat of an answer (even if it is unlikely). The final 10 minutes of the film are good and Damon's anger toward Amy Ryan is tangible and voices what many on the left and right feel about how everyone turned a blind eye toward the WMD question before the war.

Greengrass does masterfully use scenes in the green zone (especially the pool scene) to rightly point the finger at a certain segment of America that couldn't care less about any of these issues and just wants another Heineken. "Green Zone" becomes a metaphor for the complacency of everyone as the film wears on.