Paul Greengrass-Matt Damon's GREEN ZONE Reviews
"Similarly, Green Zone comes off as a picture made by a person with a brain as well as a conscience, though the movie's big flaw may be its unblinking insistence that we've been lied to — you don't have to read too much between the lines to see how adamant Greengrass is about that fact, though he isn't telling us anything particularly new. Stephanie Zacharek at Salon.com.
"Better late than never—a bang-bang pulse-pounder predicated on the Bush administration's deliberate fabrication of WMD in Iraq. Paul Greengrass's expertly assembled Green Zone has evidently been parked for some time on Universal's shelf. Had the movie been released during the 2008 election season, it might have been something more than entertainment. Still, Green Zone, which could have more accurately been titled Told You So, Jerk-Off!, does gain some coincidental topicality for opening just days after the Iraqi elections and the release of Karl Rove's new book, Courage and Consequence, even if the zeitgeist has moved on, with the unwinnable war now in Afghanistan and the Bush disaster barely a memory." J. Hoberman in The Village Voice.
"But like all of the best action filmmakers — including Kathryn Bigelow, justly rewarded at this week’s Academy Awards for her stringent, soulful work on The Hurt Locker — Mr. Greengrass has never been interested in technique for its own sake. Action under pressure is, for him, a test and a revelation of character. The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum refined this axiom to its philosophical essence. Mr. Damon’s character in those movies never knew who he was until he saw what he did." A. O. Scott in the New York Times.
"Director Paul Greengrass is working his way through recent American history, but it's giving him a bad case of the shakes. His latest, "Green Zone," which dramatizes how bureaucratic arrogance and stupidity ended up pouring gasoline on the Iraq insurgency, is watchable in spite of Greengrass as much as because of him. The story is good enough to make viewers want to ignore the photography." Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Photo: Green Zone (Jasin Boland / Universal)