‘Bourne’ again ... in Iraq - Military Movies - Military Times

‘Bourne’ again ... in Iraq

When the movie business hits upon a successful concept, there’s usually no limit to the retreads and spinoffs that will be trotted out to squeeze every possible nickel before the corpse is left to rot on Hollywood Boulevard.

Unfortunately, the late, prolific thriller author Robert Ludlum wrote only three Jason Bourne novels — the lout — and Hollywood has already churned through all of them.

What to do? Make a Bourne film and call it something else: “Green Zone,” which reunites Matt Damon, star of the Bourne films, with Paul Greengrass, director of the last two Bourne films, for another Bourne-like government conspiracy.

“Green Zone,” very loosely “inspired by” a nonfiction book by Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran and scripted by Brian Helgeland (“Mystic River,” “L.A. Confidential” and many others), has all the right thriller touches in all their proper places.

But in subject matter, tone and timing, the film is smack in “been there, seen that” territory.

It’s a few weeks after the invasion of Iraq, and the anarchic looting and mayhem is in full swing in Baghdad. Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Roy Miller (Damon) leads a team that is running down a list of sites that supposedly warehouse Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

The higher-ups in Washington are hot to “find something they can hold up on CNN.” But Miller hits one dry hole after another (in what I took to be a tongue-in-cheek commentary, one supposed WMD site turns out to be a toilet factory) and he realizes the intel he’s getting isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

The intel seems to be coming from smarmy Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), a Bremeresque proconsul type in Baghdad. Why the intel is faulty, and whether it is purposely so, is at the heart of the conspiracy that Miller is sucked into and must unravel.

Others in the mix include:

• Marty Brown (Brendan Gleeson), the CIA station chief with no love for Poundstone.

• Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), a Wall Street Journal reporter who has been blithely cheerleading for the White House in pumping up the “Saddam has WMD” meme (clearly based on New York Times reporter Judith Miller).

• Gen. Mohammad al Rawi (Igal Naor), the “jack of clubs” in Washington’s deck of 52 most high-value Iraqi targets.

Damon always turns in a professional performance, and Greengrass, despite his excessive camera flourishes, knows how to build dramatic tension (or fake it when he has to).

But it’s all pretty preposterous. Viewers whose knowledge of the military derives mainly from the movies may not know better, but military viewers will find as many unintentional laughs as intentional thrills here.

Start with the idea that the civilian Poundstone has at his beck and call a squad of spec ops troops (the film tags them as such by gracing their leader with a Fu Manchu ‘stache) that he sends out to do his personal wet work — to include assassinating other U.S. troops.

Miller himself seems to have only the thinnest link to a chain of command and roams the city at will with his own support cadre.

But here’s my biggest problem with this film: What it has to say about the real-world issue of how the threat of WMD was used to justify the invasion of Iraq is simply too-old news.

Somebody jobbed somebody on that score; you can argue about who, precisely, the somebodies were, but there is no arguing that, seven years on, no WMD have yet been found in Iraq.

And because we know this, the film’s entire premise, up to and including Miller’s final, figurative flip of the bird to the Poundstones of the world, feels utterly hollow.

At this late date, it’s all water down the Euphrates. As such, the pulse-pounding veneer of “Green Zone” is a thin mask over what is, at best, a truly fleeting thrill.

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Rated R for violence, language. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.