'Green Zone' looks great, but plot is full of holes

GREEN ZONE — ★★1/2 — Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson; rated R (violence, profanity, gore, torture, slurs, brief drugs, vulgarity); in general release

"Green Zone" looks and feels an awful lot like the Oscar-winning Iraq war thriller "The Hurt Locker."

That's no surprise, because both films are set in the Middle East and both were shot by the same cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd.

And that helps explain why the action scenes have some of the same gritty, authentic feel and why they're so tense and riveting.

Unfortunately, that makes it even more of a shame that the plot itself is riddled with so many holes. While it's watchable, this convoluted and contrived speculative piece is not the ideal reteaming for "Bourne Supremacy" star Matt Damon and that film's director, Paul Greengrass.

Damon stars as Roy Miller, a U.S. Army officer who's part of a team searching for weapons of mass destruction. (The story is set in Baghdad, during what was called Operation Iraqi Freedom.)

So far, Miller and his fellow soldiers haven't found anything substantive in any of the locations they've explored.

As his frustrations over these dead-end missions build, Miller starts to believe the supposed "intelligence" they've received is faulty and that it might be deliberately misleading.

So Miller takes his concerns to a somewhat shady Pentagon official, Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), as well as an embittered CIA operative, Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson). He has to decide which of these two men he can trust and how far he's willing to go to find out the truth.

In adapting journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland take an accusatory tone toward the U.S. government's actions in the Middle East.

The film's conclusion is a little too pat, and those expecting to see Damon as an action star (a la the "Bourne" movies) will be disappointed.

Also, the filmmakers misuse talented actress Amy Ryan, who serves as an expository plot device. (She plays a Wall Street Journal reporter who's being fed information by both sides.)

"Green Zone" is rated R and features strong scenes of war violence and other violent imagery (brawling, gunplay and shootings, explosive and vehicular mayhem), strong sexual language (profanity), gory and bloody imagery, scenes depicting torture and interrogation, derogatory language and slurs (based on racial and national identity), brief drug content (intravenous injections), and other off-color references (slang). Running time: 115 minutes.

e-mail: jeff@desnews.com