MATT DAMON sizes up some suspicious looking paint cans.

Green Zone
Directed by: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleeson
Distributed by: Universal

Bourne in Iraq? Not really. Despite this film teaming both director and star of the last two Bourne films and featuring the series signatures of queasy-cam™, deadly seriousness, shady foreigners and ludicrous amounts of weaponry, Green Zone aspires to a level of verisimilitude lacking in the super-spy thrillers.

Actually, that isn’t really right either. There’s a fundamental problem with the premise of Green Zone and it is this: we already know the ending from the very start. Then again, that didn’t hurt Titanic, Memento or White Men Can’t Jump.

So why does the knowledge that American troops never found WMDs in Iraq hobble the film entirely? Because writer Brian Helgeland presents the events as far less complicated than we know they were.

Green Zone appears to be a docu-thriller (as Greengrass has been known to make) but the events transpire in such a tiny universe that it seems laughable to glean any insights into the time between when real-life American troops hunted for chemical and biological wingdangs and W’s government declared out-and-out war.

Exactly four people (and a couple of comically one-dimensional bit-players) set off every action in this film. And each character is hugely simplistic. Damon does a solid job as All-American quarterback/Warrant Officer Roy Miller, who grows increasingly frustrated at his superiors’ obfuscations and does the job himself, dammit. Before they barely utter a sentence on screen, it’s obvious that Greg Kinnear will be a pinched, duplicitous Bush official and Brendan Gleeson will remain a rumpled, truth-to-power-speaking CIA bureau chief. Amy Ryan’s investigative journalist is a saintly cardboard cut-out (although she does set off the State Of Play-esque plot, which was nice).

With this line-up, absolutely no complications, vexations or extra dimensions are added. And this goes all the way up to the very end of a story we already know.

That said, Green Zone does a couple of things very well. It portrays the terrifying exposure that American ground troops are subject to on the streets of Baghdad. It reveals the infinitely troublesome political and moral nature of the Iraqi invasion, from the situation rooms to the reactions of the locals. It is very technologically impressive as an action flick.

Greengrass’s queasy-cam™ is finally put to appropriate use as it positions you right over the shoulders of the military, and that impact would be even more striking if he kept it static during the dry, autocratic military meetings inside the offices in the “International Zone”, that is the American-controlled Green Zone of Baghdad. That contrast would’ve added another layer to the suspense and to the message. But he doesn’t.

As a timewaster thriller, it does the job. As a tale of political intrigue, it does well because the plot is derived from the real world. But these two sides can never be reconciled when the enormously complex issues involved are played out with such painfully black-and-white characterisations of goodies versus baddies, even when they’re all Americans.