Marshall Fine‘s primary complaints about Paul Greengrass‘s Green Zone (Universal, 3.12) are that (a) PG shaky-cam is starting to piss him off, and (b) Greengrass shouldn’t have taken the fictionalized chickenshit route but followed the lead of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s best-selling book and followed the facts and named real names.

The result of Greengrass’s fictional approach is that Green Zone advances a bullshit notion that honest soldiers (like Matt Damon‘s Roy Miller) telling the truth helped the press raise public awareness and turn the tide of opinion against the war. The facts — including the press’ shameful performance and polls showing that a solid 50-plus percent of Americans still believe we actually did find WMD — would suggest otherwise.”

“Given a stronger sense of purpose, the film might have recounted exactly those failings and shown in stark relief how we were hoodwinked into war. Then again, there hasn’t been an Iraq war movie yet that found an audience by telling the truth about government mendacity. This one might because it’s essentially being sold as Bourne 4.”

Boxoffice.com’s Ray Greene has criticized Green Zone in a similar vein, but with the gloves totally off — he’s really torn it a new one. He calls it “an exercise in commercial cowardice masquerading as a thriller about political bravery…a kind of moral atrocity.”