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Wednesday, 17 March 2010 |
Paul Greengrass tries his level best to direct the hell out of - and thus hopefully compensate for the deficiencies of - Brian Helgeland's script, an in-name-only adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's non-fiction bestseller Imperial Life in the Emerald City:
This book tells the bureaucratic story of Iraq's Year 1, the year after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, when the United States was the legal occupying power and responsible for the country's administration.
The primary mechanism for that work was the Coalition Provisional Authority, headquartered in the Green Zone, a blast-barrier-encased compound created around Hussein's Baghdad palace, on the west bank of the Tigris. Chandrasekaran, The Washington Post's Baghdad bureau chief during this period, catalogs a lethal combination of official arrogance and ineptitude behind those walls that doomed Iraq to its bloody present every bit as much as insufficient military manpower did.
{Michael Goldfarb, 2006 New York Times review}
Promising material - but what we end up with is an old-fashioned star-vehicle for Matt Damon as (fictional) Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, a straight-arrow rebel-in-khaki crusader-for-good who quickly realises that something is wrong with the WMD 'Intel' and determines to do something about it. This brings him into contact with various two-dimensional "characters" on either side of the goodie/baddie divide, interspersed with action-heavy sequences in various hazardous corners of the Iraqi capital.
These scenes are hyper-kinetic and shot with wobbly hand-held cameras, with a chargingly urgent score that at times sounds like off-cuts from Michael Mann's Heat. Indeed, the whole mood, aesthetic and approach of Green Zone now feels rather desperately over-familiar (Rendition, The Kingdom, Body of Lies, The Hurt Locker, etc etc). And one senses that Greengrass - whose films are generally only as good as their screenplays allow - has exhausted his particular directorial box of tricks. From Bloody Sunday to Bourne Supremacy to United 93 represented a steep upward ascent; from United 93 to Bourne Ultimatum to this represents a similarly sharp downward decline.
Green Zone is never exactly dull, and there's one brief spell of genuine quality thanks to a fleeting cameo from real-life Iraq veteran - now Texas politician - Allen Vaught that briefly recalls Ben Sliney's as-himself performance in United 93. But for the most part there's a general impression of capable professionals dutifully but pointlessly going through the motions, rather like Miller's crew as they conduct their fruitless searches for WMD.
Neil Young
17th March, 2010
¦ Reel cinema, Newark, UK, 16.Mar.10 (£5.80) ¦
* US/UK/France/Spain; copyright-dated 2009.
I thought it was there but it just brought me down
Ripped the magazine open, it brought me round
Green grass was clear in the boundary zone |
