Sunday, July 12, 2009
A+E, Movies, Reviews

Explosive ‘Hurt Locker’ a gripping war movie

A ShortTakes review

War is hell—but we get some damn good movies out of it. “The Hurt Locker” may be the best combat adventure since “Black Hawk Down,” as well as one of the year’s best so far in any genre.

In 2004 Baghdad, Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spec. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) welcome their new squad leader, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). On their first mission together, they learn James is no team player but an adrenaline junkie who never tires of putting his life—and theirs—at risk. Sanborn and James lock horns repeatedly, and in their downtime they punch each other for sport. The timid Eldridge admires James, who at that point has disarmed 873 bombs in his career.

Director Kathryn Bigelow devotes almost no time to the men discussing their feelings or the women in their lives; instead, they indicate their feelings through their actions. There are no patriotic speeches, no scenes of grateful Iraqis cheering their invaders, but there are no antiwar messages, either. Adding tension to the series of nail-biting bomb-defusing sequences is a running count of how many days the men still have to survive before their company is rotated out of harm’s way.

The screenplay, by Mark Boal, a journalist who was embedded with a bomb squad in Iraq, is impressively spare. Bigelow masterfully establishes how an inability to communicate keeps the soldiers suspicious and the locals resentful, and keeps you in the middle of the action, alert for snipers, remote detonators, suicide bombers and other facts of wartime life. Essentially a series of suspenseful set pieces, “The Hurt Locker” makes you realize how little suspense movies offer in this age of instant gratification, when audiences demand a swift payoff and refuse to wait for it. The thrills in this “Locker” are worth the wait. 3.5 STARS—Steve Warren