Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Written by Mark Boal
Starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Evangeline Lilly, Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce
Release Date June 26th, 2009
Published June 25th, 2009
The Hurt Locker is the most intense, breathtaking moviegoing experience of my critical career. I have had some movies really grind me into my seat but few do so as compellingly as The Hurt Locker, an Iraq war drama that avoids nearly all of the pitfalls of the myriad Iraq war movies of the past five years.
Lost in a sea of muddled agendas and fearful pandering, movies about the Iraq war have never taken hold within the culture the way movies like All Quiet On the Western Front or Patton did for World War 2 or Platoon and Full Metal Jacket did for Vietnam. Hell, even Rambo managed to be both an audience grabber and a commentary on Vietnam.
No such luck for movies like Jarhead or Stop-Loss. Each a well made, well intentioned movie, but movies at a loss to capture this elusive and ill-defined conflict in the middle east. Each attempts to be about soldiers and their real life struggles and each fails for lack of conviction and an inability to draw a line between anti-war agendizing and dramatizing the real struggles of their characters.
Now comes The Hurt Locker a film that sidesteps agendizing through the luck of timing and a smart specificity. The luck of timing comes in being released at a time when the conflict has receded from the headlines and is no longer the burning hot lightning rod it once was. The specificity comes from the focus on a set of very specific, very unique soldiers, the men in the business of bomb disposal.
Jeremy Renner stars in The Hurt Locker as Lt. Willam James. On his third tour, James claims to have disposed of more than 800 bombs and he keeps coming back for more. Whether he is addicted to adrenaline or has a serious death wish, William is the best at what he does and his seeming recklessness is arguably what has kept him alive. He makes decisions that others don't have the guts to make.
Joining William on this tour is Sgt. JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) a bomb tech in duty only, he has yet to raise the nerve to don the protective suit and walk up to the bomb. And Specialist Owen Eldridge, a skittish youngster who remains tortured by all he's seen.
Together they are fighting through the last 100 days of what will hopefully, for Sanborn and Eldridge anyway, be a last tour. Each day brings a seemingly more dangerous and even larger bomb and the tension released at the end of the day is something akin to a constant stream of adrenalin that never shuts off.
Director Katherine Bigelow chooses a pseudo-documentary style of shooting that amps the tension even more. The digital cameras and limited angles draw the audience right into the danger. You will be surprised to learn that The Hurt Locker recorded more footage than even Coppola's epic Apocalypse Now and yet, what is onscreen is so tense and tight it seems of a moment, in the moment.
You have seen bombs and even bomb disposal in movies before and you have certainly seen the horrors of war before. But, there is something in the style of Director Bigelow and the intensity of Jeremy Renner's performance that sets it apart, and above so many other war movies.
Much of that comes from the scripting of Mark Boal who researched The Hurt Locker as an embedded journalist for Playboy Magazine. Traveling with and witnessing what bomb techs do in Iraq gave Boal a unique and thorough perspective on these very particular men and their job.
The Hurt Locker is a visceral, physical, filmgoing experience that will have you twisting in your seat, holding your breath and begging for the air to come back into the room. It is a fierce and ferocious film that will leave you spent by the end. The walk from the theater is likely to be a somber one, but with the reward being a movie experience like few others.
Moving, exciting, exhilarating and enthralling, The Hurt Locker is among the best movies of the year.
