Friday
10Jul2009
Movie Review - 'The Hurt Locker'
Friday, July 10, 2009 at 12:03AM | The Hurt Locker
Starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty  |
I hope you see The Hurt Locker. It isn't a movie for everybody, and in fact, its intense nature could limit its audience even further. But see it if you can. As war movies go, it isn't spectacularly graphic or violent, and that's part of the issue - there's simply no release for the audience.
That's not a flaw of Kathryn Bigelow's film in any way; as it happens, I'm hard-pressed to find a single flaw with it. It breaks the conventions of most war movies, telling a story not just the soldiers but the kind of soldiers who fight for our freedoms. It's common to politicize this war in films, but there's not a single mention of policy, because it doesn't matter on a day-to-day basis to the three men we're following. They have bigger concerns.
The Hurt Locker couldn't be a Civil War movie or a Vietnam movie because of the nature of the work undertaken by the men in uniform. The Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit is a bomb squad in Iraq that spends its days defusing IEDs, those ghastly homemade roadside bombs that have been responsible for roughly 40% of coalition deaths in the war. A more ordinary movie would blink when faced with covering this kind of excruciating and detailed mission, choosing instead to show the bomb being deactivated and quickly cutting to the next scene. Bigelow plants several IEDs in her film, and not all of them end happily. That's how it goes.
Her decision to treat each bomb like a patient in surgery is riveting. There are three points of view: Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spc. Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) scour the perimeter looking for a suspicious character with a remote detonator. Sanborn is more cool and collected, but sometimes wonders why he's fighting. Eldridge is slightly less nervous than we would be in his situation, seeking counsel from the staff psychologist, or as much of that as he can take.
They focus on the external while Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner) hops in a giant blast furnace of a protective suit, slowly paces down the dusty streets of Baghdad with eyes on both sides of the fight fixed on him, and systematically takes apart the mechanism that arms the IED. That's the theory, anyway.
Colin Boyd | Permalink | in Reviews, The Hurt Locker, War Movies | Print Article | Email Article | 9 Comments | Share Article
Reader Comments (9)
5 damn dirty apes? This one cleaned up nice!
Nice.
I've held Bigelow in high regard ever since I saw "Point Break" in the early 90s.
It's a shame that she hasn't done more work. I don't know if it's deliberate on her part or the way that the industry works for women directors.
Also, her film "The Weight of Water" is a film that I initially resisted, but which stays with you a long time after viewing.
Beautifully written, Colin! I spent all day writing the Renner interview piece earlier in the week that I Hurt Locker'd myself out so still need to fine-tune the review which is going up some time today but your take was incredibly well considered. After talking to you at the theatre, I wasn't sure if it was getting the whole 5 but glad it did because I think it's the strongest work of the year so far. Bravo!
5 apes...whats next cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria?!?!?!
Seeing it at 1 today...CAN NOT WAIT!!!!
I'd been wondering for a while what it takes to get 5 damn dirty apes. Can't remember the last one.
The last one wasn't that long ago; a little something called Slumdog Millionaire.
Hey Colin i'm dying to see this. Any idea when it's opening in Utica Ny if at all?
No, I don't. The official site has 19 cities listed, and I'm not sure if Boston, Manhattan, or Toronto is your best bet. I think it would have to do really well to get to Utica, just based on the way they normally spread these out. Another factor is that it's Summit and not, say, Fox Searchlight. Summit doesn't really have a model for movies like this yet.
Finally got a chance to check this one out... I thought it was a good movie but not a great movie and not something I could consider a masterpiece. I loved the direction and performances but the story bored me and there were a few parts (the sniper battle being the big one) where I didn't understand the point of it and technical errors pulled me out of the moment.
Every scene involving the defusing of a bomb as awesome, and I normally don't like it when a camera zooms in during a shot but Kathryn Bigelow pulls it off nicely and it genuinely adds to the suspense. Unfortunately once we're just hanging out w/ the characters between bomb drills I los interest and thought about how much better Generation Kill (based on a true story so maybe that's not fair to compare) handled its characters.
Also, I looked at my watch more than once so the movie failed at keeping my attention from start-to-finish, and I'm not a guy that needs to be stimulated by fast-cuts or jump scares by any means. Maybe that was the point of the film - to capture the dull moments soldiers experience between the adrenaline rushes in the field - and I'm wrong?