Green Zone: Critic Reviews

Green Zone is a strangely dated, foolishly grandiose, simplistically angry fictional war-zone thriller about how one patriot blows the lid off America's missteps in Iraq.

When 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.

Green Zone has technical flair, but we expect more from Greengrass.

It takes a complex and important story and renders it facile. Characters are etched too clearly in black and white.

A jangly, noisy, compulsively restless thriller on a par with the Bourne movies, shot through with political critique.

If tremulous 100-yard-dash camerawork is Greengrass's voice, this sort of movie might not be the song for him.

You catch your breath only to have the wind knocked out by the mirage of the carefree scene around the Green Zone swimming pool.

Intelligent, tough and gripping.

Green Zone weakens its claim to authenticity with fictional fudgings. And the weakening works both ways.

An urgent piece of work.

Damon's the anchor, a fine one at that, but even he can't seem to hold the filmmakers' attention for long.

It's only the adrenaline-inducing techniques that conceal the lack of imagination.

Green Zone approaches every human activity as if preparing to defibrillate.

Yes, the film is fiction, employs farfetched coincidences and improbably places one man at the center of all the action. It is a thriller, not a documentary.

Green Zone is partly real and partly, increasingly, fantastic and outlandish in its wishful thinking.

Manufacturing thrills takes precedence over any kind of journalistic insight.

In 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.

Frenetic in execution and formulaic in substance, the film leaves one lathered into a frenzy but not moved, at once overwhelmed and undernourished.

Green Zone hits hard and doesn't forgive. It plays out like fiction, and in some ways it is. But in too many ways, it's not.

It's certainly interesting to see what's been reported on the manipulation of information played out as drama, and the acting is uniformly good.

Shot 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.

So vivid and convincingly realistic is the physical depiction of Baghdad in the early days of the American occupation that the introduction of trumped-up thriller elements feels like an unwanted intrusion.

Politics aside and purely as a piece of genre moviemaking, Green Zone is a solid example of a political paranoia thriller.

Green Zone isn't so much a bad movie as a misguided one.

Green Zone has an attitude -- it persuades in almost documentary style that the war was sold on false pretences but no one's motives in this tangled affair can be completely trusted.