Green Zone (15)
Verdict: Tendentious deconstruction of the Iraq warRating:
Director Paul Greengrass teams up again with movie star Matt Damon - their previous outings together were the last two Bourne sagas - to create a preachy political thriller disguised as an action flick.
It's most convincing in terms of atmosphere.
Taking aim: Matt Damon in Green Zone
Damon plays Roy Miller, a decent U.S. officer in Iraq just after the fall of Saddam.
Miller's job is to hunt for weapons of mass destruction, but he deduces, like veteran CIA agent Brown (Brendan Gleeson at his most
rumpled and worldweary), that they don't exist.
So Miller goes on a (highly improbable) freelance operation with some of his men to hunt down one of Saddam's top generals, who he thinks may have been involved in passing false information to the Yanks.
In doing so, Miller falls foul of an arrogant Pentagon official (Greg Kinnear at his greasiest) who uses American special forces (led by Jason Isaacs) as his own private army to prevent Miller and Brown from uncovering the truth.
Barry Ackroyd contributes some of the same breathlessly chaotic camera work he used so cleverly on The Hurt Locker.
But Greengrass and he resort to overkill, and I frequently wished the camera would stop wobbling and remain in focus so we could see more of what was going on. The frantic editing also becomes tiresomely obtrusive.
In the end, I didn't buy into the conspiracy theory about WMD that Greengrass and writer Brian Helgeland are trying to sell us.
Important truths do emerge - especially the naivety of President Bush in announcing victory prematurely, and the stupidity of the allies in not planning how to reconstruct Iraq.
Yet most Britons will already know this. Too much of the film has the air of being aimed at ignorant American teenagers.
The result is a proficient thriller that overreaches itself, politically and visually. Instead of convincing us, it lectures us.
And instead of thrilling us, it just seems annoyingly hyperactive.
