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100It is a thriller, not a documentary. It's my belief that the nature of the neocon evildoing has by now become pretty clear. Others will disagree. The bottom line is: This is one hell of a thriller.
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88Damon's prior appearances as Jason Bourne make him credible in this role.
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75Mixes fact and speculation in a way that's already raised the ire of some on the right as well as on the left.
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63Miller's wake-up call is meant to be ours. Too little and too late? Maybe. But even in this Bourne Zone, Damon and Greengrass haven't shirked their duty to enlighten and entertain.
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75Watchable in spite of Greengrass as much as because of him. The story is good enough to make viewers want to ignore the photography.
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58With Green Zone, though, the malaise has finally hit me. So while Damon's Miller uncovers the (inconvenient) truth of why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, all I want to know is: How does he suggest we get out?
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80Made with daring and passion, it attempts the impossible and comes remarkably close to pulling it off. So close, in fact, that the skill and audacity used, the shock and awe of this highly entertaining attempt, are more significant than the imperfect results.
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40For a while Green Zone generates genuine excitement, as well as plenty of provocation--a fatuous surrogate for Ahmed Chalabi, a pervasive scorn for American planning--but then goes off its own reservation into a won't-fly zone of awkward preachments and hapless absurdities.
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78No matter where your political gullibilities lie, Green Zone is a riveting piece of actioneering.
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63Zone feels anticlimactic now. It also pales in comparison to Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker," the most powerful film yet made about the Iraq war.
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63In the wake of the Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker" - a far better film, and one with a less strident, less obvious agenda - Green Zone arrives looking strangely anachronistic.
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63Green Zone is somewhere between a blockbuster and a tract -- a traction movie. It whizzes and bangs and sizzles as it chases the truth like a dog off its leash.
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50Director Paul Greengrass has applied his jumpy, tumbling visual style to action blockbusters with Matt Damon and serious dramatizations of political events. This Iraq war drama makes a game attempt to meld the two, though manufacturing thrills takes precedence over any kind of journalistic insight.
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67Indeed, Green Zone plays a little bit like a video game version of the Oscar-winning film (The Hurt Locker)-- which should tell you right off whether it's for you or not.
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58Green Zone wraps up with a wish-fulfillment fantasy that is about as believable as watching reinforcements riding in to save Custer.
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67For the first time in Greengrass' career, the politics too often get ahead of the action, so points that might have been subtly embedded in the story are instead laid out like a left-wing editorial.
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80When Mr. Greengrass made "United 93," his 2006 reconstruction of one of the Sept. 11 hijackings, some people fretted that it was too soon. My own response to Green Zone is almost exactly the opposite: it's about time.
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50Once Damon's one-man truth squad goes off the reservation and starts behaving too much like Jason Bourne for comfort, the film begins not only spilling more blood but also leaking crucial credibility.
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63Partly real and partly, increasingly, fantastic and outlandish in its wishful thinking.
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50Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River) is the real culprit here, creating a crude paint-by-numbers fiction that keeps yelling about the importance of the truth while hurtling in the opposite direction.
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70This is a movie that recognizes there's no straight line to the truth, which is part of what makes it vaguely unsatisfying -- though it's also what keeps it honest.
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80Christopher Rouse's rapid-fire editing nervously stitches the stunts, chases, fights and confrontations together. It's a remarkable film.
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63The jittery, scattershot camerawork of Greengrass's longtime cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd, was used far more coherently in Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker," and the constant blurry close-ups of computer screens and street-level scrums lose their power with each successive cut.
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80A master of smash-mash montage and choreographed chaos, Greengrass is the best action director working today, adroit at producing the sense of everyone converging and everything happening simultaneously.
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80The cast is strong, and Damon is a dependable center for all this, a classic American good guy wanting to know what's rotten and why.
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100An expensive flop and the latest Iraq movie to be shunned by the mass audience, Green Zone was still the year's most visceral, thrilling entertainment.
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40It's also rather tawdry. The climax is as ludicrous as any Jack Bauer adventure, and Greengrass is always on shaky ground. Literally.
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63Green Zone is just an excuse for director Paul Greengrass to haul out his jittery hand-held camera as Miller and Co. sprint through the streets and buildings of Baghdad in pursuit of one villain or another.
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40What lends the film its grip and its haste is also what makes it unsatisfactory.
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40Not since a Nam-scarred Sly Stallone asked, "Do we get to win this time?" in "Rambo: First Blood Part II" has an American action star been deployed to rewrite history so thoroughly.
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50Green Zone isn't so much a bad movie as a misguided one.
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50Shot by Barry Ackroyd, the same cinematographer who filmed "The Hurt Locker," and using the same camera techniques, this movie looks like outtakes from a much better film.
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75Green Zone can't make up its mind whether it's "The Bourne Insurrection" or "Hurt Locker: The Prequel."
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70To pretend that the film doesn't make a political statement is silly. Of course it does. It wouldn't be effective at all if it didn't.
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40Green Zone is an exercise in commercial cowardice masquerading as a thriller about political bravery.
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75It's at times implausible and heavy-handed, but thrillers need villains and it's not like the Ba'ath Party had an exclusive license on 'em.
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80Bourne goes epic. A wham-bam actioner, but its pointed political subtext ensures Damon and Greengrass deliver their most provocative mission yet.
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50To suggest that a lone, brave soldier could have set things right with a little amateur sleuthing seems like cinematic wish-fulfillment, an insult both to the intelligence of viewers and to the troops.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 58 out of 85
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Mixed: 10 out of 85
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Negative: 17 out of 85
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IsaacV.3Just didn't really enjoy it. not deep enough and the action is pretty sensless. Very little good things to say about this film.
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MarkM3