MOVIE REVIEW: GREEN ZONE

My wife and I went to see Green Zone over the weekend. The movie has had a lot of hype in the media and was touted as another Bourne Identity and Bourne Ultimatum. I have to admit that I came away from the movie disappointed.

Matt Damon, whom I like as an actor plays a man who discovers something is amiss in searching for WMD's in the Gulf War. The plot was good and follows the suspicions of many, that they didn't exist. This said, the movie was rated R and needless to say extremely rough gutter language. That was a turn off, even though it depicts "reality." Just gets tiresome to here every other word be a blankety blank. The plot of the movie was good and the basis for the movie was good. It was action packed as you might expect. Yet, the movie right in the crux of having you going takes a dramatic turn to the disappointing. Enter the bureaucrats who throw around their weight and seek to squash Damon's character from exposing the truth. From that point, the movie loses its wind and gets lost in a fog of twist and countertwists. In fact, you get the distinct impression the movie that it is making an anti-war policy statement.

The movie is based upon a book by Ravi Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad Bureau Chief with the Washington Post and the author of "Imperial Life in the Emerald City." There's a secret informant named "Magellan", loosely based on the discredited "Curveball" and an Iraqi exile waiting to take the presidential reins but the people oppose the imposing of occupational "puppet" rulers. This leaves the person watching the movie with the impression that the Iraqi's would rather have had Hussein and his sons in power than a democratic government.

I guess that whether you enjoy the movie or not will depend on whether you were for the war or against it. AS for me personally, I believe it falls well below the caliber of Bourne Identity or Supremacy. I could have read the newspaper and come away with the same feeling that this movie left me with and spent far less money.