Matt Damon stars as a rogue U.S. army officer seeking the truth about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction in the Paul Greengrass thriller Green Zone. (Jonathan Olley/Universal Studios)

One of the things The Hurt Locker’s Oscar triumph proved is that you can create a serious film about the Iraq War and still make it popular. In Green Zone, director Paul Greengrass pushes that premise further, welding an exposé of the U.S.’s post-invasion follies to a high-speed, Bourne-style thriller.

Fans of the Bourne franchise won’t be disappointed. Green Zone is visceral, from the relentless pacing to the whiplash camerawork to the sushi-chef editing.

To do it, he’s recruited Jason Bourne himself, Matt Damon, whom Greengrass directed in the Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum sequels. This time, Damon isn’t playing a rogue CIA assassin, but a rogue U.S. army officer, assigned to ferret out Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Fans of the Bourne franchise won’t be disappointed. The movie opens with the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad in 2003 and builds from there. This is Greengrass’s signature visceral filmmaking at full throttle, from the relentless pacing to the whiplash camerawork to the sushi-chef editing. Only this time, he uses it to plunge us into the chaos of a shattered Iraq and whip up our outrage at a war started under false pretences.

Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) and his team of soldiers have been spending the weeks after the invasion scouring Baghdad and its outskirts for WMDs and coming up empty-handed. After risking his men’s lives on yet another false lead, a frustrated Miller dares to question the source of the army’s intelligence, only to be slapped down by his superiors. As it turns out, though, he isn’t the only one with doubts. He quickly finds an ally in CIA agent Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), a grizzled Middle East expert whose advice goes unheeded as the arrogant Washington boys waltz in to rebuild Iraq.

Then there’s Wall Street Journal correspondent Lawrie Dayne (The Wire’s Amy Ryan), whose articles have hitherto supported the WMD claims, but who is starting to get antsy. She’s begun needling her “unnamed” source, slick government official Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), to reveal the identity of his source for the weapons intel — a high-ranking Iraqi known only as “Magellan.”

Miller soon stumbles upon an Iraqi informant of his own. Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), a bitter veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, has spied members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party about to convene for a secret meeting and leads Miller and his men to their hideout. In the ensuing raid, Miller comes close to catching Gen. Al Rawi (Yigal Naor), one of the “most wanted” men from Saddam’s inner circle, and confiscates a diary listing Ba’athist safe houses.

With the aid of Freddy, who becomes his translator, Miller sets out on a personal mission to track down Al Rawi and uncover the truth about “Magellan.” Out to thwart him are Poundstone and his military proxy, the brutal Maj. Briggs (Jason Isaacs).

Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River) borrows the successful Bourne blueprint, right down to the characters. Damon’s earnest Miller (based on real weapons hunter Richard Gonzales) is just Jason Bourne without the superhuman skills. Gleeson is essentially the crusty male equivalent of Joan Allen’s good CIA boss Pam Landy. Even the fictionalized historical figures — Ryan’s Judith Miller-like journalist, Raad Rawi as an Iraqi puppet leader à la Ahmed Chalabi — feel like they belong in a Bourne scenario.

Within that reductive context, though, Helgeland and Greengrass cannily capture the competing forces at play in postwar Iraq: the hubris of Washington’s caretaker government, the soon-to-explode hatred between the country’s Sunni and Shia Muslims and the credulity of the embedded U.S. media.

The only element they don’t fully exploit is the Green Zone itself — the fortified enclave within Baghdad where the U.S.-led provisional government set up shop. The film claims to be “inspired by” Imperial Life in the Emerald City, the award-winning book by Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran. If so, the movie doesn’t make much use of it, except when contrasting the resort-like luxury of the zone with the madness outside its walls. Damon’s character is continually shuttling between the real Baghdad, where Iraqis are rioting over water shortages, and the Americanized oasis in which the western invaders lounge about in Saddam’s former palace, enjoying pizza and beer by the pool.

Journalist Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) questions Chief Warrant Officer Miller (Damon) in Green Zone. (Jasin Boland/Universal Studios)

Chandrasekaran’s book is a much richer source of Bush-era folly. Its pages are filled with egregious examples of the misguided rebuilding effort, in which micro-managing U.S. bureaucrats, preoccupied with tax laws and anti-smoking campaigns, fiddled while Baghdad burned. To do it justice, though, Greengrass would have to venture out of his own comfort zone and into absurdist satire. This movie ends up revealing his limits as a director.

It will also suffer from comparisons with The Hurt Locker. Bigelow’s intense drama still has its moments of downtime and character development. Greengrass, in contrast, doesn’t let his audience catch its breath. The film’s irony would have been more effective if he’d shot the Green Zone scenes in a placid style – even languorously – but they’re just as frenzied as the action sequences.

The doc-style, shaky-cam cinematography is by the excellent Barry Ackroyd, who also lensed The Hurt Locker. The blink-of-an-eye editing is by Christopher Rouse, who won an Oscar for The Bourne Ultimatum. And the production design is by Dominic Watkins, who does a terrific job of recreating dry, dusty Baghdad out of Spanish and Moroccan locations.

All three also worked on Greengrass’s last historical thriller, United 93. In some ways, Green Zone is a sequel to that film, which reconstructed events onboard the doomed 9/11 flight. When it was released in 2006, many wondered if it was too soon to be reliving that tragedy. With Green Zone, you have the opposite feeling. It could be the fact that the Bush administration’s WMD ruse is old news, or it could just be the effect of Greengrass’s adrenalized storytelling, but you come reeling off this two-hour thrill ride, not outraged — just exhausted.

Green Zone opens March 12.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.