The Bourne Appendices

When it was released earlier this year, all the trailers and commercials for the movie Green Zone wanted you to believe it was the next best thing to another Jason Bourne movie -- from director Paul Greengrass and starring Matt Damon! An action-packed thrill ride! And yet, the reviews were decidedly mixed, to a point where I decided to downgrade the film from an "in theaters" experience to a "home on my couch" experience.

The skepticism was well-founded. This is definitely not another Bourne movie. That's not to say it's a bad movie, but it's definitely not in the one bad-ass against the world mode of the Bourne trilogy.

Green Zone is a kinda-sorta fictionalized (but not entirely) film set in Iraq in 2003. As part of the US forces sent in to Baghdad, our hero is living the frustration of receiving bad intelligence. Everywhere his team goes, no Weapons of Mass Destruction. He's soon caught up in the pursuit of real answers, a projection for anyone in the audience who questions the motives of the U.S. invasion (then or now).

It's actually not a very political movie, in my opinion. And yet I'm sure it's going to strike some people as political. There's action, but not of the "Team America: World Police" anthem variety. The baddest of the bad guys is "one of us," and a rather stalwart ally for our hero is "one of them." It's as cloudy as the real life situation on which it is based.

But what reservations I have about the movie aren't for any of that, but more because it isn't the strongest of action movies. The big sequences are few and far between, and lack the energy of... well, the thing we're meant to compare it to: the Bourne movies. But that said, the story does hold together quite well, not mindlessly bobbing from action beat to action beat in the manner of so many other movies. The acting is good too, not just from Matt Damon, but from Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, and Brendan Gleeson. And I actually liked that it didn't varnish reality for the sake of making feel-good entertainment.

Overall, I'd say it just squeaks into a B-. Perhaps I'd have thought even better of it with the right expectations. Perhaps then I can re-align yours, should you choose to watch it.