The Hurt Locker - Rob Culpepper

I'm surprised no one has reviewed The Hurt Locker. As you probably remember it won the Oscar for Best Picture last year over Avatar and Inglourious Basterds, among others (it also won Best Director). So here goes.

I had really high hopes for this movie. Not only because of the awards it won, but also because everyone I talked to said it was really intense. I had a couple people tell me they couldn't watch it again. So I was freaking ready. And yes, the first half was intense. I perspired a little. But after a while I found myself used to the tension and relaxed a bit more. At some point I realized the writer was not about to let this character he was really proud of get blown to smithereens.

Some critiques I had heard of the film include: the sniper scene (bomb defusers would not have a fat clue how to effectively use a sniper rifle), the Bagdad-at-Night scene (no way someone would have done that or made it back alive), and the second Bagdad-at-Night scene (after the tanker truck blows up...no one would do that and put his comrades in that kind of danger). It's got to be hard to make a war movie these days because you can see actual combat footage online, on any news station, and in docs like Restrepo and others. Moviegoers just know too much about how things are actually done to buy into un-realities like you have in The Hurt Locker. I'm not saying cavalier people don't do crazy things in the military, but to put them all on one character in the span of a two hour movie pushes the believability into negatives.

Speaking of the characters, I felt like they were pretty one-dimensional. Jeremy Renner (as William James, badass) played what is undoubtedly a fun character. He has no fear, no concern for others or protocol, and no reservations about anything. He's a cowboy in a foreign desert. We know everything we need to know about him in the first 30 seconds he's on screen. But he doesn't grow. He's impervious to the conflict around him. Then there's Anthony Mackie's character (named Sanborn) who acts a foil to William James. He's responsible and courageous, but he's not James's equal. The worst part of the movie, in my opinion, was supposed to be one of the emotional high-points, when, after a bomb almost kills them all, Sanborn tearfully tells James, "I want a son, I want a little boy!" Really? No, really? you've got to be kidding me. Perhaps what James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow shared in common was their love of terrible dialogue (cf. Avatar). The third main character, Eldridge, was played by Brian Geraghty. He's the coward who has to be told he's doing ok and will make it, etc. Again, another tired role, though perhaps not unfounded on the field of battle. He does finally stand up to James, but only after James is responsible for almost killing him. The only other character we meet from the whole company is a hapless colonel who gets himself blown up.

As for the plot, what else can I say? It had it's moments, but its arc was weak. The one interesting thing about the movie is the collection of bomb parts Renner's character keeps under his bed. It becomes fodder for a bad joke (Eldridge finds James's wedding ring in the box and asks "what is this?" to which James replies "like I said, things that almost killed me.") Since plot-realism was thrown out early, it would have been cool to have this squad of bomb defusers coming up against the same bomb maker and playing a bit of cat and mouse. There's this scene where they're trying to defuse a bomb and someone is videotaping the scene from a balcony. You think: are the bombmakers learning how the defusers work, how they operate? this could be really interesting. But that's the last of it. That story is never explored. The moviemakers instead opt to make the movie about the people and not the plot. Which doesn't have to be a bad decision. But the characters just aren't interesting enough to keep it going for 2 hours.

Decent movie about war? Sure. Best Picture? Hardly.