Green Zone is a new Iraq war thriller that couldn’t have planned its release date any better.  Being released wide on March 12th, the movie hits theaters just five days after another Iraq war movie, The Hurt Locker, took home the Oscar for Best Picture.  The movie’s marketing team, however, has taken a different tack.  They are focusing on the collaboration between director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon, whose two previous collaborations resulted in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, two of the best and most popular action movies in the past decade.  Whereas those movies were pure entertainment, however, Green Zone has a decidedly more political agenda.

Damon stars as U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, whose job it is to seek out the hiding places of the WMDs in Iraq circa 2003.  Of course, he’s not finding them.  After striking out three straight times, he begins to suspect that the intelligence reports his missions have been based on come from an unreliable source.  That source is code-named “Magellan” by Clark Poundstone, a high ranking political official who is seemingly calling all the shots from Saddam Hussein’s former palace in Baghdad.

While on another of these pointless missions, Miller is tipped off by a local that some Iraqi bigwigs are having a secret meeting nearby.  They crash the party and catch a glimpse of one of Saddam’s Generals, who just manages to slip their grasp.  With the help of a CIA operative, Miller attempts to track down this General whom he believes holds the secret to the location of the WMDs.  What he actually finds is a conspiracy that may be even more frightening.

Although Green Zone is not a Bourne movie, Greengrass brings the same visual intensity and rapid editing that made that franchise so memorable.  The pacing is relentless and the movie never lets up, making for an engrossing experience.  Of course, Greengrass’ kinetic style does come with its drawbacks, most noticeably a camera that is sometimes too shaky for its own good, causing for some distracting focus issues and a few scenes in which the camera interferes with the storytelling.  For the most part, however, the action is still shot and edited in a way so that the audience is able to keep up.

Matt Damon is again fantastic, leading me to debate whether he is the best actor we have going right now.  Although his intense, determined Roy Miller is a similar character to Jason Bourne, it comes on the heels of his remarkably comic performance in The Informant! and his Oscar-nominated turn in Invictus, two roles that really showed off the actor’s impressive range.  Working again with Greengrass, Damon is a gripping guide through the war-torn streets of Baghdad in Green Zone.

Between his two Bourne movies, Paul Greengrass directed United 93, about the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001.  That film offered the director a chance to make a political statement, but he instead created more of a reenactment.  In Green Zone, working from a script by Brian Helgeland, the director does make a statement and he makes no attempt to hide his opinion.  A few times the message does feel a bit preachy, but the film avoids halting for a long-winded speech or extended scenes of exposition.  The result is a political movie that does well to balance message and action.

For those who are looking for something like the Bourne movies, Green Zone shouldn’t disappoint.  For good measure, the movie climaxes with a chase scene that could have been taken right out of one of those movies.  It does feel slightly out of place, but it’s just so darn entertaining that you just go with it, not worrying about details like why the in-shape Damon can’t seem to catch the older, seemingly out-of-shape General.

I enjoyed every minute of Green Zone and consider it to be the best American movie to be released so far this year.

Green Zone is rated R for “violence and language.”  The movie takes place in a war zone and therefore has all the violence associated with that, plus the typical, liberal language spoken by the soldiers.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of Green Zone.