You know that thing when someone says “you’ve got to meet so-and-so, you two are so alike”? Those words are the surest death knell of a potential friendship that I’ve yet heard. Having been told that this other person is so like yourself, when you’ve put so much time into being the one and only authentic version of you there is, it’s no surprise that you view the imposter with suspicion. As it is with people, so with films sometimes. Green Zone was so the sort of film that I’d like, what with being made by Bourne director Paul Greengrass and with its star Matt Damon, and — even more exciting — presenting a contrarian perspective of the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, that it could have been made just for me. Which is a lot to live up to. Sad then, but not surprising, to report that it didn’t really work for me.

There’s an easy analysis of the film’s failure — it falls between two stools. One is Greengrass the populist, who crafted two of the three Bourne films so expertly, outBonding James Bond in bringing intelligent thriller spectacle to the mainstream. Then there’s the politically motivated Greengrass, responsible for Bloody Sunday, concerning the Irish conflict of the same name, and United 93 about the doomed September 11th flight in which passengers fought back against terrorists. Green Zone is what happens when Greengrass attempts to occupy both seats at the same time. As a result, he lands on his arse.

It starts promisingly enough, with Damon as an American soldier charged with finding WMDs, who for the third time in a row comes across a site where they’re supposed to be only to discover that there are none there. He has no reason to suspect anything other than faulty intelligence, but as the story progresses it becomes clear that there’s a bigger picture which troops on the ground are unaware of. WMDs were the justification for the invasion, which is going ahead for the simplest of political reasons — best summed up in an American protestor’s banner of the time, ‘How did our oil get under their soil?’.

I’m totally in favour of the idea of the film, so what happened between concept and execution for me to be fundamentally unsatisfied by it? Most likely, it’s that it bears some of the hallmarks of Greengrass’s Bourne style — action perceived by a subjective camera — without delivering the payoffs of an action film. Instead, and rightly, it becomes a story about a soldier’s quest to discover the truth. And it’s a story that doesn’t really deliver the goods.

Easy for me to say as an armchair critic, when of course Greengrass and crew rightly desired to make a film that is a box office hit to reach as wide an audience as possible. How then to do satisfy that objective? Perhaps by making the film and more Bourne-like. The Manchurian Candidate — first time round with Frank Sinatra, not Jonathan Demme’s remake (good as it is) — was a powerful piece of subversive filmmaking during the Vietnam era that didn’t make a direct connection with contemporary politics but tapped more subtly into the mood of the time. Same with The Third Man. Perhaps, as with both those examples, something more elliptical rather than direct would reach a large audience.

Besides, Iraq has already found its definitive film in The Hurt Locker, which isn’t overtly political, but in its scenes of the traumatised bomb disposal expert in a supermarket back when he’s in the States is more eloquent than any on-the-nose story could ever be. The definining political film of our times, about the jockeying for war rather than war itself, is In The Loop, which conveys the souldead venality of the political class with the same inspired clarity that Hogarth brought to his monstrous etchings. Next to those fine films, how could Green Zone compete?