Since its wide opening this summer, "The Hurt Locker" was highly praised by most movie critics around the world. According to calculations made by the film-buff website "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?", it is currently ranked as the thirteenth best-reviewed film of the new century. However, it did not find an audience in a blockbuster-crowded summer, with megaproductions from "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" to "G.I. Joe", the new "Harry Potter" entry and "The Hangover". One may hope it will find the audience it deserves on DVD and Blu-Ray, because it is without a doubt the most exciting film that came out this summer, a masterful exercise in revealing character through action.
Jeremy Renner stars as Sgt. William James, a cocky and arrogant bomb disarmer with little respect for the authority of Sgt. Sanborn (Played by a surprisingly strong Anthony Mackie). The first half-hour mostly consists of scenes of him at work, constructed with meticulous precision of the different critical situations and the methods he employs to solve them. We gradually get to know this character with these scenes, not with informative dialogue but in the depiction of his behavior in the fire of action. At work, James is passionate, in the zone. His job consumes him. His superior severely criticizes his peculiar and often deliberately dangerous procedures, but after all, who is he to question a true professional's way of doing his job? This level of tension between the two characters is maintained throughout the film, and only adds up to the strong psychological foreground of a seemingly two-dimensional story.
The suspense in most of the film's key scenes therefore gains in intensity. These are flesh-and-blood characters we quickly come to identify with and care about. Bigelow films them in a way that we, the audience, can know, at any given time, where one is, how he is related to the other ones in and out of the frame, and what is at stake. Time and space elements have to be established with exactness and clarity in order to make an action/suspense situation work as realistically as possible, and that is what Bigelow is doing here. The audience does not have to figure out what is going on; everything is crystal clear. Shots can last a certain time here without cutting right away to the next and thus get room to breathe. Nothing is overemphasised with music or distracting camera tricks. Barry Ackroy's photography is lean and efficient. Everything suddenly becomes all too real, and you quickly realize as a spectator that you are in the hands of a true maestro of genre filmmaking, a focused and intuitive director who knows how to make an audience's blood curdle while so many Hollywood filmmakers have forgotten how to.
"The Hurt Locker" was written by Mark Boal, who was himself a war correspondant in Iraq a couple of years ago. He is also the man responsible for the screenplay of the 2007 Paul Haggis film "In the Valley of Elah", a perhaps more ambitious but far less convincing film about a grieving father searching for his military son gone missing just after his return from duty. If Bigelow's craftsmanship remains undoubted, some are still skeptical about the script's purpose or relevance, or the film's histerically enthusiastic critical response it received. I have to admit myself that I am still surprised (though positively) about its massive critical acclaim and major oscar consideration because it remains, in my humble opinion, nothing more than a skillfully made and uncommonly breathtaking action film. It is as much - and unapologetically so - a genre piece such as Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 white-knuckle thrillride "The Wages of Fear" (a film I find very similar to "The Hurt Locker"), or a profane potboiler with class like "The Departed" (which also unexpectedly ended up winning four academy awards). I bet Kathryn Bigelow would have fallen of her chair a year ago knowing she would get a best directing oscar nomination for this film.
Its opening statement, "War is a Drug", pretty much sums up what the film is about, and altough simple, remains highly effective. "The Hurt Locker" is definately worth seeing for the Hitchcockian sense of suspense on display and the excellent performances from Renner and Mackie. While I could not call it a masterpiece, I don't think the director's intention was to make one, and that's also one of the film's greatest strenghts; its lack of pretension. Bigelow and her team set out to make a film about men, men at war, men at work in all its sheer intensity and fierceness, ended up making a very good one, and ultimately succeeded entirely on these terms.
3.5 Stars (out of 4)
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