Archive for March 10th, 2010

Short Take: Action-packed and smart, but perhaps too slanted

Director: Paul Greengrass (Bourne Supremacy, Bourne Ultimatum)

Screenwriter: Brian Helgeland (Mystic River, L.A. Confidential)

Cast: Matt Damon (The Informant!, Bourne series), Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges), Greg Kinnear (Flash of Genius)

Length: 1h 55m

Synopsis: The setting is Baghdad, Iraq, 2003. U.S. Chief warrant officer Roy Miller (Damon) is directly involved with the American takeover of Iraq by leading squads of men into hostile sites where weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are suspected of being kept and/or manufactured. After coming up short several times in a row, Miller begins to seriously question the intelligence that he and his men are receiving. Instructed to basically shut up and do his job, he instead takes advantage of when an Iraqi local offers him a tip about a meeting of high-ranking Iraq military officials by acting on the information first and relaying it later. Doing this gets him involved in a world of intelligence politics that he was not ready for, and that he may not be able to escape unharmed. Read the rest of this entry »