BY ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
The case has been made that the Bush administration railroaded America into invading Iraq by ignoring evidence, facts and logic and never considering the consequences.
With "Green Zone," filmmaker Paul Greengrass commits a similar sin. His film about the invasion and the search for phantom weapons of mass destruction ignores some inconvenient truths -- and indeed the very book that his script is based on -- to conjure up an entertaining if sometimes risible ticking-clock thriller about what the government didn't want you to know in the run-up to war.
The book was Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," a dry comedy of errors about U.S. arrogance, inept planning, naive political optimism and pure White House incompetence. Greengrass and Helgeland have wrung a conspiracy out of that, with Matt Damon as a heroic in-over-his-pay-grade chief warrant officer who starts asking questions about why all these WMD sites he's risked life and limb to get to have turned out to be empty.
Greg Kinnear is the cunning Bush Pentagon planner who is there to play politics with every decision. Brendan Gleeson plays the CIA section chief who can see the future and lectures one and all about the trouble that will begin after a few days without water, electricity or anything for the vast, newly unemployed Iraqi army to do. Amy Ryan is the guilt-ridden Wall Street Journal reporter who printed White House whoppers and now sees the consequences. (By the way, she's based on Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times.)
"Green Zone" isn't so much a bad movie as a misguided one. In the Greengrass zone, action is amped up by whiplash editing, shaky cameras and snippets of night-vision video. The director, who made "United 93" and two of the "Bourne" movies, has had a huge effect on action filmmaking, and this one stages chases and house-to-house combat with great verve. But Greengrass loses the story's central theme: The political hacks were living in a bizarre alternate reality while chaos reigned outside the Emerald City's walls.
Gleeson offers multiple variations on Colin Powell's "You break it, you buy it" analogy. An earnest Damon repeatedly discovers that he and the country have been lied to. The filmmakers pile on evidence suggesting that the people who planned the Iraq invasion weren't intellectually up to the task of sweating the details. But in the end, the viewer is left thinking just this: Yeah. And?
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