Cast: Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, Brendan Gleeson, Greg Kinear

Screenwriters: Brian Helgeland (screenplay); Rajiv Chandrasekaran (book)

Director: Paul Greengrass

It’s been touted as ‘Bourne goes to Iraq’, and in some respects this summation of the latest Matt Damon-Paul Greengrass team-up, the political action thriller Green Zone set in the US 2003 invasion of Iraq, is accurate. The shaky-cam hyper-kinetic approach to action scenes that Greengrass began with The Bourne Supremacy and fine-tuned with Ultimatum is present and deeply effective. But where Bourne was an action franchise set in a fictional world with a fictional (sometimes super)hero at its centre, Green Zone is set within a real world setting far more akin to Greengrass’ earlier work such as United 93 and Bloody Sunday.

Damon is Warrant Officer Roy Miller, a soldier tasked with the unenviable job of searching Iraq for WMDs, only intel from his superior officers turns up little more than abandoned factories and deserted warehouses. Greengrass though tells a tale that it is imbued with all the urgency of the Bourne franchise, and it is testament to his skills as a filmmaker that he does so with a story to which we all know the controversial, and hitherto unresolved, conclusion. Departing the WMD-search and following info from an Iraqi civilian, Miller ‘goes rogue’ and sets off on a search for an Iraqi minister who may or may not have been involved in the US decision to go to war, soon finding himself embroiled in a political tug of war between Greg Kinear’s slimy neocon, Jason Isaacs (impressively moustached) special forces operative and Brendan Gleeson’s old school CIA agent.

Circling the US’s case for war like a vulture, Greengrass picks over a narrative that has been deconstructed countless times before, but Green Zone doesn’t illuminate anything further than what we already know – there were no weapons, it was a great big conspiracy, and politicians are snakes. Taking its cue from Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City’, Green Zone is not a literal adaptation and Greengrass sidesteps a ‘factual’ approach in favour of a ‘fictional’ one populated with created characters, albeit ones based on actual soldiers and much-documented events. So why construct fiction when the real story is so compelling? Greengrass’s decision to plump for an action thriller as opposed to the pseudo-documentary style of United 93 is based, the filmmaker says, on his wish to draw in the ‘Bourne audience’, those seeking guns, explosions and thrills and spills, to a film with political weight. To make a film that appeals to the critics as well as the action fanbase, and in these attempts he is wholly successful.

A political thriller with a purpose wrapped up in a Hollywood action movie, Green Zone is both exhilarating and provocative, boasting a collection of tense action scenes and a blistering twenty-minute chase scene at the film’s climax. What with the demise at the box office of other Hollywood films to address the Iraq issue – Lions for Lambs, In The Valley Of Elah, even The Hurt Locker, while winning Oscar glory, pulled in a paltry $15 million at US theatres – it could prove an approach to drag the issue into the movie mainstream.  Despite this, the film has drawn criticism in the States for, amongst other things, being ‘slanderous’ and ‘anti-American’, yet these accusations hold relatively little water – the film’s ‘based on’ tag is founded on reports by Chandrasekaran, a journalist who experienced post-invasion Iraq from the inside. And while Green Zone’s focus is on issues that already seem to belong to a distant past, the film’s final scene shots of Iraqi oil refineries ensure that it remains vital, compelling and nothing short of one hundred percent relevant.

By Alasdair Morton

Green Zone is out now via Universal Pictures.