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RSS Feed - ReviewsThe Hurt Locker
By EdwardHavens
June 25th, 2009
On its surface, "The Hurt Locker" has absolutely nothing going for it: barely known Jeremy Renner as its lead, a director whose best known film is a nearly twenty-year-old cult film about surfing robbers, and a subject (the Iraqi war) that has been anathema to filmgoers for the past several years.
However, if one goes below the surface, one would discover an incredibly powerful film from a gifted under-sung filmmaker, featuring amazing performances from a trio of exciting young actors and a movie that isn't as much about the Iraqi war as it is about how the Iraqi war has shaped one young man in particular.
The screenplay, written by reporter Mark Boal and based on his experiences being embedded with an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team in Iraq in 2004, finds Staff Sergeant William James (Renner) sent in Baghdad after the death of another EOD technician. To Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), to whose EOD team James is assigned to, the new guy is trouble with a capital T, a loose cannon prone to doing potentially deadly things like taking off his protection suit or lighting off smoke flares that cut visibility for the support team, while to Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), the third member of this EOD team, James's wild ways only bring up more fears about his own suspected impending death. But with 873 bombs disarmed and counting, there must be a method to James's madness, and certainly one needs to be a little mad to willingly walk in to a situation that could easily kill you.
What separates "The Hurt Locker" from other movies in its alleged sub-genre, including "Home of the Brave," "In the Valley of Elah" and "Stop-Loss" is that we do not spend a whole lot of time outside of the war zone. "The Hurt Locker" is mostly concerned with James and his team, how they dispose of bombs and how this affects their psyche. James may have a wife and child back home, as opposed to his teammates who don't have much of anything anywhere, but that's not going to stop him from getting his job done. It's the adrenaline rush that matters most to Staff Sergeant William James. That moment when you're standing in front of an explosive device that could destroy a city block, and one mistake could send you to your demise. So gung-ho is this young man about his job, he constantly drinks when he's off-duty, he can't talk to the wife ("Lost" hottie Evangaline Lilly) on the phone because he has trouble communicating with practically everyone outside of his specific duty, and he keeps a box of mementos of the things that almost killed him in the field. Really, if you think about it, it's a sad existence, but it's the only one he knows.
Director Kathryn Bigelow has never been a major cause célèbre amongst cinephiles. Her movies, while inarguably visually arresting, have always left something to be desired in the human emotion department. Bigelow has always maintained a cold, professional distance with the characters in her movies, and that detachment kept potentially good movies like "Point Break" and "Strange Days" from remaining anything more than curiosities for fans of the stars in those films. That detachment, however, is perfect for "The Hurt Locker," whose lead character is already emotionally vacant from everything that isn't an explosive. With cinematographer Barry Ackroyd ("United 93"), Bigelow has successfully built a vision of war rarely seen on screen, a visceral nearly first person perspective of war where the rush of combat is a welcomed relief to the monotony of life.
It takes a great actor to bring that off, and Jeremy Renner has brought forth the finest performance of his career. Staff Sergeant William James isn't an easy guy to like, and maybe we're not supposed to like him at all, but Renner makes sure we at least care about him and what he does, even when his actions are too self-serving and potentially lethal. But little of that would matter if James's teammates aren't equally game, and Mackie and Geraghty make sure "The Hurt Locker" isn't a one-performance game. So important is the play between the three of them that when one of them is off-screen for a spell, the film isn't quite as special. Also very good in blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos are Ralph Fiennes, David Morse and Guy Pearce, each who manage to bring a true sense of character with only handful of scenes each.
It would be a shame if "The Hurt Locker" was unfairly ignored by the masses. "Midnight Cowboy" wasn't just a movie about a male prostitute. "Rocky" wasn't just a movie about a boxer. "Titanic" wasn't just about a boat that sank. All these films were about people whose lives where shaped and changed by what happened to them at a specific moment in their lives. To call "The Hurt Locker" anything less than one of the best action films to make it to the screen in many years would be a true disservice to its director, actors and technicians who made a movie that is miles above any recent movie it might be compared to.
My rating: A