REVIEW: ‘Green Zone’

If you like watching people play “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ on the XBox, you may enjoy Green Zone. While it is thin on story, it is quite stunning to watch. The only thing that kept this mediocre Hollywood bundle of clichés from being a total stinker was the world-class editing by Oscar winner Christopher Rouse (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) and stunning camera work by Barry Ackroyd (“The Hurt Locker”).

Green Zone RCC Rating: Worth Watching On Cable

Having said that, the film opens up with a series of contrived scenes where Matt Damon plays an all-too-heroic American soldier in 2003 Iraq who discovers over and over that there are no weapons of mass destruction in the locations to which he had been sent. This sends our hero on a quest to get to the bottom of a vast government conspiracy, pulled off single-handedly by Greg Kinnear. “Where are the WMD’s?” the character exclaims throughout the film like an echo of Sean Penn’s 2003 award speech. This super soldier eludes dozens of US troops, fights off countless faceless villains and captures one of Saddam’s top men. He completes all of this completely unscratched, emails a full account of the story to all of the media and even has his face-to-face ‘gotcha’ moment with Kinnear. The film’s typecasting was pathetic, from Jason Isaacs (“Brotherhood”) as Damon’s nemesis all the way to Brendan Gleeson (Harry Potter films) as the world-worn CIA agent. Another Bush-era conspiracy film down the tubes.

Damon’s choices of films are typically wiser than this. I suspect his agent, Patrick Whitesell, owed Michael Moore a big favor. Consider it paid. The writer of the film, Brian Helgeland, is one of my favorites – even though he can turn in hit-or-miss work. He is, after all, the first person in history to win an Academy Award (“L.A. Confidential”) and a Razzie Award (“The Postman”) in the same year. I had hoped for strong character development, as Helgeland does like almost no other Hollywood writer. Instead, he fed us a chewy meal with no real flavor. It was only Damon’s marquee value that kept Green Zone from being a straight-to-video Van Damme knockoff.

If you like visuals, see it. If you like story, skip it. Overall, I would recommend watching it on cable.