After coming up short time and time again, U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) is starting to suspect the intelligence leading him and his team to supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) sites in Iraq is just plain wrong. Nothing is making any sense. Not only is he coming up empty none of the places they’ve been led to appear to have ever been WMD locations in the first place putting his men in jeopardy for no reason whatsoever.

Jason Isaacs and Matt Damon in Unviersal Pictures' Green Zone

Looking for answers Miller comes into contact with CIA station chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) who believes Defense Intelligence agent Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) is putting politics ahead of the truth and frazzled Wall Street Journal reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) who is starting to believe her stories that helped lead the U.S. into war might not have been as accurate as she was led to believe. Going off reservation the soldier and his team begin hunting a mysterious informant codename Magellan, positive that in finding him the truth will come out and the real reasoning behind this conflict will finally be known hopefully saving military lives in the process.

Green Zone, the film pairing actor Damon with director Paul Greengrass and the first not revolving around Jason Bourne, is a visceral and exciting modern day thriller that sadly feels two or three years late. As fascinating as much of it is Brian Helgeland’s (L.A. Confidential) script, based in part on Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, it doesn’t offer up anything we don’t already know, treating its observations that facets inside the United State’s government lied its way into the Iraq War as if they were positively revelatory and not yesterday’s news.

That fact aside, this movie still works on more than enough levels to make it worth the price of matinee ticket. There is an energetic urgency echoing Damon and Greengrass’ Bourne epics that grabbed me by the throat and then refused to let go. Even better, the conversations and debates it can spark in regards to Millers’ actions are wonderful ones, trying to work out whether or not his decision to go outside his orders in search of the truth is outright treason or justified by circumstances an absolutely fascinating one.

It also helps that, despite the fact it doesn’t offer up anything new, the story itself is still pretty darn spellbinding. Just as a pure thriller, Helgeland’s script crackles with intelligence, its central mystery a mesmerizing one that’s a lot of fun to decipher. Sure he plays his hand a little too early in regards to its denouement revolving around Magellan, Miller, a helpful Iraqi nicknamed Freddy (Khalid Abdalla, giving the film’s most complex and interesting performance) and a Special Forces operative named Briggs (Jason Isaacs) but that doesn’t mean I was any less interested to see how their dynamic played itself out.

There will be lazy comparisons to Kathryn Bigelow’s Best Picture winning The Hurt Locker but other than the setting these are completely different films. There will also be those that want to dismiss Green Zone as liberal Hollywood hyperbole and while the point of view behind it all is hardly conservative in nature it doesn’t exactly throw either the war or the soldiers fighting it under the bus. If anything it goes out of its way, sometimes a bit too much so, to celebrate both them and their reasons for being there, and anyone who refuses to see that because of some narrow minded political agenda probably hasn’t seen the big picture since George W. Bush took the oath of office back in 2001.

The bottom line is that this movie is exciting and thought-provoking, and while its insights are old hat the way Greengrass delivers them is anything but. Sure the movie shares some of the same visual sensibilities of United 93, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum but for my part I think that’s just fine. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (who coincidentally shot The Hurt Locker) and editor Christopher Rouse, a Bourne trilogy veteran, are at the top of their collective games, John Powell’s (Stop-Loss) kinetic score keeping the pulse pounding never allowing for even a moment to catch one’s breath.

In the end I liked Green Zone, maybe not as much as I had originally hoped to or maybe not quite in the way I had originally anticipated but I did like it all the same. It’s smartly written, nicely acted and features moments of bristling action that’s as thrilling as probably anything else I’m likely to see this year. For a March release this one is pretty darn solid, and to say it’s one of the few I’d be interested in seeing for a second time would be a decided understatement.

Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)  

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