Occupational hazards

Bourne for battle: Jason Isaacs and Matt Damon in Green Zone

YOU COULD see Paul Greengrass's latest film (very, very loosely inspired by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book Imperial Life in the Emerald City) as occupying territory equidistant between the director's United 93and his Bournefilms.

Like the former, Green Zone, set in Iraq during the months following occupation, seeks to make a serious study of America's responses to perceived threats from the Muslim world. Like the latter, it features much shaky footage of Matt Damon running down alleyways and blowing things up.

We should not be surprised that one objective compromises the other. That noted, the fact that the film still works as well as it does offers testament to Greengrass’s unparalleled skills as an orchestrator of cerebral mayhem.

Damon plays an army officer deployed to locate those famously elusive weapons of mass destruction. The news that he takes the task seriously now appears faintly comic to us, but it seems that an entire division was set up to burst into blameless lavatory factories and surround vacant grain warehouses. At first, Damon blames faulty intelligence reports, but he soon comes to believe something more cynical is afoot.

Making common cause with a high-ranking CIA operative (Brendan Gleeson, exhibiting the tortured integrity of a Graham Greene character), Damon tentatively begins to piece together a conspiracy linking the US State Department with certain of Saddam’s generals.

You could easily take issue with the specifics of the film’s argument. Without quite drifting into Oliver Stone territory, Greengrass favours the most sinister solution to the film’s key questions: Why were there no WMDs, and why did the allies think (or pretend) that there were? But the film-makers’ broader case has been rehearsed – and confirmed – so often you get the sense of a director pushing hard at an open door. Do we not all know the WMD argument was an empty chimera?

Still, there remains a decent action film to be enjoyed. Neither as lean as the Bourne adventures nor as raw as United 93, Green Zonenonetheless offers the happy viewer more than enough exploding helicopters and pursuits filmed through night-vision goggles. Whatever else you might say about the film, you are unlikely to be bored by it.