LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – In “Green Zone,” director Paul Greengrass brings the frenetic, run-and-gun style with which he utterly transformed the movie thriller in the Jason Bourne series to a different kind of thriller, one with a sharper political edge
For “Green Zone” explores the Bush administration’s willingness to embrace palpable lies over murky truths in order to sell the Iraq War to the American public
Iraq mostly has been a nonstarter at the box office, but this is Matt Damon, Greengrass and the “Bourne” team reunited on another breathless venture into ticking-clock urgency. So Universal should easily overcome that hurdle to rack up considerable theatrical coin in North America and overseas.
Drawing on his years as a British television journalist covering global conflicts for ITV, Greengrass brings a cinema verite style to his thrillers. He makes these movies look as if a guerrilla camera crew has somehow tagged along with a movie’s protagonist to catch key moments in an unfolding story as it explodes in the character’s face.
In Hitchcock terms, the movie has both a goal and a MacGuffin. The goal is the determination by U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) to discover why his team of inspectors comes up empty every time commanders send them to find chemical weapons in the Iraqi desert. The MacGuffin is a small notebook an Iraqi general grabbed four months earlier as the U.S. invasion began. It contains the addresses of Baathist safe houses in the Baghdad area.
Endangering the lives of his soldiers to hit a target, which Pentagon “intel” has fingered as a storage site for MWDs, and again finding nothing, Miller wants answers. Returning to Baghdad, he encounters three people who could supply them: Defense Intelligence agent Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), CIA station chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) and Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan). Miller doesn’t like what he hears.
All the intelligence comes from a single source. This source has confirmed Dayne’s many stories about Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of MWDs and now pinpoints the sites Miller’s team fruitlessly searches. Then Miller runs across an individual who does have accurate information. A local, English-speaking Iraqi who calls himself Freddy (Khalid Abdalla) risks his life to approach Miller to tell him that key Iraqi army figures, all wanted by coalition forces, are meeting in a house nearby.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6240YS20100305?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a49:g43:r5:c0.052786:b31573844:z0
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