After watching the trailers for this movie, it looked like it was going to be another good action packed war film to watch over and over again. Like ‘Black Hawk Down’ or a modern ‘Saving Private Ryan’ of sorts. After all the hype however, this has just turned into another time I have been suckered into watching a film that looks amazing in the previews, a few good reviews and then *bang*, slapped in the face with a load of rubbish.

‘The next Bourne’ has been splashed about a lot, and I can’t help but disagree 100% with that comment. Firstly the Bourne series had a great (and very original) plot, great twists, great action scenes, good acting and managed to keep me thoroughly entertained throughout. Green Zone however has little plot (other than what we’ve actually watched on the news about the Iraq War), there is only really one twist which, in the films defence, is actually a good one when the Iraqi translator pulls some excellent shooting out the bag when you least expect it, but the film also has sparse action scenes and poor acting. However, what I hate most of all is being preached to in a movie. I couldn’t stand the 2008 remake of ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’ for this exact same reason. All this hippy crap of “be good to the earth”, “look after your planet”. Fuck off! If I want to be told what to do I’ll join the army.

Speaking of which, is what Matt Damons’ character, CWO Miller, decided to do. Got shipped off to Iraq to lead a squad tasked with finding the WMD’s that Mr Bush had so adamantly told us were there, and then decides to take matters into his own hands and ‘uncover’ the evil-ness of the American government when he finds there are no WMD’s. This is a film, and while I’m watching a film I don’t care if there were actually WMD’s in Iraq, I don’t frankly care if Saddam Husain used to dress up in stockings and suspenders and get Chemical Ali to spank him with a 12 inch dildo. What I want is to be entertained.

In the case of this film entertainment was hard to find. I think all the action scenes were in the trailers, so if you’ve seen the trailers you’ve seen the best bits of the film. Other than that, we follow CWO Miller around Iraq flirting with the press, his commanding officers, and the CIA, looking for hard evidence that the government knew there were no WMD’s before the invasion even started. And you guessed it, at the end of the film he finds whatever he’s looking for, emails members of the press and boom: the world’s a better place. Everyone’s happy. Evil has been avenged. Oh come on…

A lot of people I’ve spoken to complained about some of the ‘Blair Witch Project’ style camera work that goes on throughout, however in the film’s defence I have to paraphrase someone when they came out with;

My eyes have been able to follow moving objects since I was about 3 months old so I had no problem with the camerawork.

The FPS camera work is one of the sole achievements of this film as it puts you right in there with the soldiers and you do feel like you’re on a journey with them, rather than sitting on your sofa scratching your arse and eating popcorn.

I slated ‘The Hurt Locker’ as a war film gone wrong in a previous review but at least that film wasn’t preachy. In Green Zone we have another case of a rogue soldier running around Iraq seemingly doing as he pleases and not getting in any trouble for it. A story this does not make. Especially as it’s trying to tell me the Iraq War was wrong, we’re all bad people and governments are evil.

Overall I would really not recommend this film, and it’s definitely not in the same league as the Bourne films to which it’s been compared so many times. A lovely 1 star puts this almost at the bottom of the pile, hidden away never to be watched again.