The Iraq war movie machine, much like the war itself, hasn’t been going swimmingly. The movies, earnest and ham-fisted in a way that would shame even Stanley Kramer, have stunk and bombed, all while genre films that brutally comment on the Bush II era (The Bourne Ultimatum, Manderlay, various zombie movies) have succeeded. So please, for the love of dog, America, stop seeing the racist space robot movie and sacrifice your hard-earned dollars for The Hurt Locker, an Iraq movie that wholly deserves to break its subgenre’s money-making curse.
The strange thing—maybe the key to its success?—is that it’s borderline apolitical, albeit quite a bit far from the right. Following an IED bomb-dismantling unit made up of Anthony Mackie (Half Nelson), Brian Geraghty and the insanely talented up-and-comer Jeremy Renner (Dahmer), The Hurt Locker is closer to a nail-biter than a polemic, with our three leads going from one sadistically tense set piece to the next. As directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark, Point Break), these sequences—the apex being a never-ending snipe-off in the desert—have the disarmingly calm intensity of The Wages of Fear, a comparison made even stronger with this film’s love for out-of-nowhere deaths.
A far more successful bid for the art-house than Bigelow’s The Weight of Water—and not coincidentally because it indulges in her considerable genre skills—The Hurt Locker is also not too far removed from Hollywood, even as it slyly subverts the cliches.
Renner is a hot-shot defuser, with some 200 dead bombs under his belt, who would once upon a time be played by Tom Cruise. Except that Renner plays him not as a cocky asshole awaiting his comeuppance but with a bemused weirdness—the kind of person who finds certain things funny that no one else would. (Bigelow also throws in some of the homoeroticism that makes Point Break such a cherished classic.)
The Hurt Locker is amazing as a thoughtful action movie but merely really, really darn good as a character study. In its final stretch, the perspective goes whole hog on Renner as he lights out on a purposefully futile do-gooder mission. This screenwriting move gets points for brazenness but fails to do a better job than what preceded it at conveying the film’s theme, expressed in a pre-titles Chris Hedges quote about war being a drug.
Renner, the film says, is a kind of addict—turning our “enjoyment” of the thoroughly thrilling set pieces into an uncomfortable complicity. B+
When women work in macho genres, people often waste a lot of time looking for stereotypical signs of “femininity,” which is not only patronizing but, more important, the least interesting way to analyze their work.
We’ve seen the scene in hundreds of war pictures—two Army men in Class A uniform walk up to a house, knock on the door and deliver the worst news imaginable. They’re often played by grave-looking extras. Here, they're the story.
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