Green Zone

With Bloody Sunday and United 93, Paul Greengrass created two of the last decade's most unmissably powerful films, concerning different "wars on terror". He has also directed two movies in the Bourne action franchise, delivering a reliable payload of thrills in each case. His new movie, an action conspiracy thriller set in Baghdad in the chaos surrounding Saddam's fall in 2003, has something of both sorts of film, but for me it's his least satisfying work to date: almost a pastiche of the hyper-kinetic Greengrass action style. The storyline is clotted without being seductively complex or even particularly surprising, and it's filled with familiar warzone chaos and boy-toy big bangs, but somehow not all that exciting.

Matt Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, who must lead his unit into desperately dangerous locations to find the weapons of mass destruction that his superior officers and a creepy Washington civilian politico (Greg Kinnear) smoothly assure him must be there. But he keeps drawing a blank. Something fishy is going on. So Miller disobeys orders and goes "rogue" to find the secret of the missing WMDs. The problem is, the action has neither the passionate flame of the Bloody Sunday and 9/11 movies, nor the unpretentious thrills of the Bournes. We all know about the WMD scandal, so the ending is basically predictable in broad outline and the twist put on it is contrived, anti-climactic and uninteresting. Green Zone has technical flair, but we expect more from Greengrass.