MOVIE REVIEW - The Green Zone

The Green Zone with Matt Damon opened up to very little overall fanfare at the box office last week, with Alice In Wonderland wiping everyone else out.

The Green Zone is one of those movies that is more than likely going to get lost. This will be a movie that will probably get more legs with On Demand or Netflix. And after seeing it, that's no real surprise. When I walked in, I was figuring that this was just another movie. And that's exactly what it is.

It's a story written about the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003. The allies have launched "shock and awe" and now it's the weeks immediately after. Damon plays Chief Miller. He is a team leader that is going out and looking for weapons of mass destruction in the U.S. Army. He is a good and dedicated soldier charged with a big job. Of course, history has told us none have ever been officially found in Iraq. And we know this today. So right off the bat, that drama is solved.

So what this movie does, is try to tell a story that slowly inches toward some kind of explanation of why we have never found any WMD's. It shows factions of our own military and government fighting among each other, each trying to manage the war to suit their own agenda. Each hiding their truth, and backstabbing each other. Even killing one another to get their objective pushed through.

Green Zone is on a slow and predictable burn to of course making the United States the enemy, and painting the U.S in the worst possible light. It culminates in a very anti-climatic action scene with cheesy "wrap it up" dialogue that attempts to be poignant. And it ends up being so silly, it's almost insulting.

Shame of it is, from a move making standpoint, GZ movies along OK. Damon is pretty strong as the "in the dark" team leader. Greg Kinnear as the villain does a nice job. The casting here is OK. The Green Zone also does a wonderful job of taking you to post war Iraq. It captures the chaos that was rampant after the initial onslaught. It seeingly at it's outset has good intentions and is well executed at times. Then it stops being an interesting story, and starts being a propaganda movie, and loses credibility. And the thing is, you see it coming all the way. And that's a shame.

There are good things in The Green Zone. Looks good, well acted, and starts out as a story you might find interesting. But it doesn't have the courage to completely tell a story you don't know. Instead, it can't resist turning into something completely different.

The Green Zone. The rental zone, when you've seen everything else.