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THE HURT LOCKER
(****)
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Movie Review by:
Jim "Good Old JR:" Rutkowski |
Directed by:
Kathryn Bigelow |
Written by:
Mark Boal |
Starring:
Ralph Fiennes, Anthony Mackie,
Brian Geraghty |
Running time:
130 minutes
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Released:
07/24/09 |
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Rated R
for war violence and language. |
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"The Hurt Locker” is not only the very best film of 2009, it is one of the
very best and most exciting war movies of any kind to come along in a long
time."
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 Some would find it easy enough to describe “The Hurt
Locker” as an Iraq War film--that is, after all what it is. But to do so would
be somewhat of a disservice. Face it, the mere phrase “Iraq War film” alone is
enough to turn off many moviegoers who have been inundated over the last few
years with a number of films on the subject that have been so grim, didactic and
consumed with preaching their message to the choir that they have forgotten to
be interesting or entertaining. Yes, there have been some interesting cinematic
works on the war to emerge in recent years, ranging from documentaries like “No
End in Sight” to fictional works like Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” but most have
been closer to the likes of such deadly earnest and deadly dull efforts as “In
the Valley of Elah,” “Rendition,” “Grace is Gone” and “The Lucky Ones”--dogs
that moviegoers of all political persuasions rightly rejected for being examples
of good intentions marred by bad film making. “The Hurt Locker,” on the other
hand, shouldn’t be tarred with that same brush--partly because it isn’t solely
about the war in Iraq per se and partly because it is such a fantastic piece of
cinema that it doesn’t deserve to be potentially yoked down in such a way
Set in Baghdad in 2004, “The Hurt Locker” follows a three-man team of Explosive
Ordinance Disposal techs who have one of the most nerve-wracking jobs of any of
the U.S. troops on patrol--they get to sniff out the IED’s that could be hiding
anywhere and defuse them under the tensest circumstances possible. As the film
opens, the team--cool and collected leader Sgt. Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce),
by-the-book Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and high-strung Specialist Owen
Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are at work taking care of another explosive device
hidden in a large public area when the robotic machinery that they use to aid
them in their work goes haywire. As a result, Thompson is forced to handle it
manually and while he and his men undertake every possible precaution to ensure
their safety, this is not the kind of situation in which everything can be
managed and before long, Thompson is no longer in charge. Before long, his
replacement, Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) arrives and while he immediately
tries to ingratiate himself with Sanborn and Eldridge, his efforts go by the
wayside the moment that they go out into the field and he demonstrates a
shockingly reckless edge to his approach--he prefers to disarm the bombs by hand
instead of using the robots, discards his protective suit (“If I’m gonna die, I
want to be comfortable”), deploys smoke bombs that make it impossible for his
colleagues to see where he is or what he is doing and deliberately disconnects
his communications gear when they order him to abandon the bomb and pull back
because of the number of potential hostiles that they have attracted.
Having such a person on a team would be disconcerting enough under most
circumstances but with only 30-odd days of service left, Sanborn and Eldridge
are legitimately concerned that his actions are going to get them killed just
before they are due to be rotated home. To them, he is just a reckless
adrenaline junkie whose places his need for excitement ahead of his duty to his
fellow men and at one point, they find themselves joking, for lack of a better
term, about simply blowing him up themselves. However, as we get to know James,
we slowly begin to see that while he does take a lot of risks that may seem
unnecessary, there may well be a method to his madness after all. For starters,
he is clearly good at his job--when pressed at one point, he sheepishly admits
to having defused 873 bombs--and there is the possibility that he is good enough
at his job to pick up on the potential dangers surrounding him in ways that
Sanborn and Eldridge, presumably still shaken from the loss of their previous
leader, haven’t grasped. There is also the possibility that no matter how many
precautions he takes, the job is still too dangerous to ever be completely
safe--if he is standing right next to an IED when it goes off, it probably isn’t
going to matter too much whether he was wearing his protective suit after all,
right? And yet, even someone like James has his breaking point and when he
believes that a young boy he has befriended has been killed by insurgents, it
sends him off on a half-cocked mission that does put him and his comrades at
risk. After making it through that ordeal, he is forced to confront the two
things that presumably scare him the most--the notion of a bomb that he cannot
defuse and the notion of being rotated back home to a world where his main
decision has shifted from whether to cut the blue or red wire to trying to
figure out what kind of cereal to buy at the supermarket.
“The Hurt Locker” was written by Mark Boal, a journalist who was actually
embedded with a bomb disposal squad in Baghdad in 2004 and who based the
screenplay on his experiences. Even if you didn’t know that going in, you would
suspect that it was written by someone with first-hand experience with the
subject because right from the start, there is a sense of clear and unvarnished
reality that permeates every frame. This is not the kind of war film in which
every character gets to deliver a speech or two that explains their various
motivations, hopes
and fears and in which the key players are pigeonholed as
heroes, villains and cannon fodder. Instead, the screenplay chooses to have them
reveal their character largely through their actions--a move that feels far more
realistic and comes across far more effectively than a lot of speechifying--and
because it refuse to ascribe any of them as being more important to the
narrative than the other, it lends an extra edge to the proceedings because it
means that any one of the characters can theoretically die at any time, a fact
underscored by the rapid manner in which both Guy Pearce and another familiar
face exit the proceedings soon after being introduced. At the same time, this is
not simply a collection of anecdotes strung together at random in the hopes of
giving it a more realistic feel. This is an elegantly constructed screenplay in
which the action has been broken down into seven largely self-contained
set-pieces in which the details change but the overriding dramatic arc--will the
guys survive their latest situation?--remains more or less the same but our
shifting attitudes towards them as the film progresses causes us to respond to
them in different ways and keeps it from growing repetitive.
There are plenty of other great things about “The Hurt Locker” but the best
thing about the film is the way that it quickly and decisively reestablishes
Kathryn Bigelow’s position as one of the best action filmmakers around after a
long absence from the big screen. From a technical standpoint, the film is a
stunner from start to finish as she moves through the various set-pieces with an
amazing command for the physical details of film making--every scene has been
meticulously planned out so that we are always aware of where everyone is in
relation to their surroundings and of the building tensions but she does these
things in such a remarkably subtle and confident manner that they aren’t
overwhelmed by the weight of the effort that went into creating them. However,
Bigelow isn’t one of the soulless cinematic gearheads who are only comfortable
with the technical aspects of the job. She is equally adept with the quieter and
more character-driven scenes as she is with the more visually spectacular
stuff--the final scenes involving James are quietly devastating in the way that
they depict what happens when a thrill-seeker is cut off from the constant
supply adrenaline that once gave his life meaning and focus. That also extends
to the low-key but incredibly effective performances that she elicits from her
actors--all of them are tremendous but it is Renner who comes out on top with
what is certain to be a star-making performance. In fact, Bigelow’s work here
can be seen as a response to all of the mindless and overblown action films that
have popped up over the last few years--here is a film that is just as
viscerally exciting as any of them and it even includes coherent storytelling, a
strong screenplay, wonderful acting and a definitive purpose to boot.
“The Hurt Locker” is not only the very best film of 2009, it is one of the very
best and most exciting war movies of any kind to come along in a long time.
However, because it deals to a degree with the war in Iraq, there is a very good
chance that many potential viewers will avoid it on the assumption that it is
going to be just another drab and dreary diatribe. This is not a film that goes
out of its way to take any sort of ideological stand regarding the war or our
involvement in it. Instead, it simply wants to present us with a war film about
the ways in which a group of soldiers react to the pressures of combat--change a
few of the details and the story could be set during any war. As a result, it is
the rare film of its type that viewers from all ends of the political spectrum
can simply watch and admire as a thunderously entertaining masterpiece of genre
film making without getting tangled up in the polemics. |
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HURT LOCKER © Summit
Entertainment, LLC
All Rights Reserved
Review © 2009 Alternate Reality, Inc.
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