The Hurt Locker
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
The Hurt Locker came out in late June and immediately generated a considerable amount of buzz. Considering that it was released in a week when its best competition was a couple of terrible sequels (Transformers 2 & Night at the Museum 2), several comedies (The Proposal, The Hangover & Year One), and a couple remakes (The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 & Star Trek), the hype isn’t so shocking, but the fact that virtually all of the buzz is overwhelmingly positive is rather unusual…especially for a film about war.
Mark Boal, the writer, is also responsible for the 2007 Iraq war film, The Valley of Elah, which was based on his Playboy article entitled Death and Dishonor from 2004. Probably because it had a decidedly more negative overall feel, that film was not as positively received…though it’s actually a better story. The Valley of Elah exhibits a definite “war is hell, war is bad” attitude though, and The Hurt Locker doesn’t seem to take an overt stance. When asked if her film was anti-war or pro-war in a Boxoffice.com interview, director Kathryn Bigelow said, “I think its non-partisan. It looks at this conflict and sees the futility in it and [shows] the courage of the men who are going out ten, twelve, fifteen times a day, saving thousands of lives disarming bombs.” Later in the same interview, however, she states, “This film is an opportunity to look at the men who have, in my opinion, the most dangerous job in the world and see them as heroes and see the price of that heroism—the courage.” Doesn’t portraying your characters as heroes make your film pro-something? Hmm…maybe it’s a pro-recklessness movie.
The film successfully establishes the ever-present danger of explosive ordinance disposal before the main character is even introduced. Then we learn that Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) is a wild man: he’s dangerous, he’s a loose cannon, he doesn’t play by the rules …and he seems to have a death wish. He’s the stereotypical “military maverick” character and we’ve all seen it dozens of times before, but – for some unexplainable reason – the cliché is being embraced in this particular case. His decisions make no sense and he endangers the lives of the people around him, but there are no consequences. There are a number of other unrealistic events that test the story’s credibility, but tension in the bomb-disarmament scenes is extremely well-done. (The climax of this outlandishness occurs when the main character decides to take a trip off-base for the purposes of vengeance.) The pace is uneven in just about every scene without a bomb and the homoerotic drunken playfight/wrestling match that turns into an actual fight was just plain odd.
- Score
- 3/10
There’s more of a story here than you will find in something like HBO’s Generation Kill, but very little of the “realistic” language. And as far as films about war go, The Hurt Locker might be the only one that leaves any sort of positive feeling in you when it’s over. That might be reason enough for many people to rate it positively, but a few great scenes tied together with pacing issues, awkwardness, a lack of realism and some Ministry songs is just not enough to sway my vote.
