Film Review: War movie leaves little time for politics as clock is ticking
"The Hurt Locker" is the first film about the Iraq War that can take its place with the great war movies of the past -- with the best American movies about the first World War, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam.
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Summit Entertainment
In a suit reminiscent of astronauts in space, Jeremy Renner prepares to defuse a bomb in "The Hurt Locker."
Rated R for war violence and language
Length: 130 minutes
Released: July 10, 2009 LimitedCast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Evangeline Lilly, Ralph Fiennes
Director: Kathryn BigelowProducer: Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Greg Shapiro, Nicolas Chartier
Writer: Mark Boal
Genre: Action/Adventure, Drama, Suspense/Thriller
Distributor: Summit Entertainment
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Wired by director Kathryn Bigelow like a ticking time bomb, with infrequent interludes for humor and only a minimum of the type of back story many filmmakers use to "explain" the intensity of their soldier heroes, "The Hurt Locker" focuses on three short-timers in a U.S. Army Ordnance Disposal unit who are trying to get through the final 38 days of their field rotation without loss of life or limb.
Jeremy Renner plays the unit's newcomer, an impulsive "adrenaline junkie" who is the chief bomb defuser. Brian Geraghty is the nervous junior enlisted man. Anthony Mackie is the tough team leader, frustrated by the apparent recklessness of his new subordinate. These actors are familiar but they're not "stars," which makes them convincing as boy-next-door soldier types; we recognize their faces, which helps us recognize their types. Meanwhile, the much more famous Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce and David Morse show up in brief, unobtrusive cameos.
By focusing on a bomb-disposal unit that spends much of its time within a "kill zone," Bigelow and scripter Mark Boal are able to structure much of the film as a series of suspense set pieces. (Boal is a freelance journalist who was embedded with an Army bomb squad in Iraq; his reporting also inspired "In the Valley of Elah," an Iraq War homefront movie.) The soldiers' encounters with IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and wired-to-explode Iraqis become extreme representations of the tug between life and death that faces each of us every day, however mundane and seemingly safe our environment. Like the 1953 masterpiece "Wages of Fear," about truck drivers who deliver volatile nitroglycerine shipments through the rugged South American jungle, or Howard Hawks' 1939 "Only Angels Have Wings," about pilots who carry mail through a foggy mountain pass, "The Hurt Locker" inspires us to appreciate the precariousness and relative brevity of existence. It's a thoughtful nail-biter, which is one reason why it seems poised to be a hit, and why it's being touted as a likely Oscar Best Picture nominee.
Most movies inspired by the so-called "War on Terror" have been politically driven "issue" movies ("Lion for Lambs") or homefront sagas of loss and healing ("Grace Is Gone," "Home of the Brave"); what almost all of them have been is flops. The unpopular Iraq War made for unpopular movies. Is it any wonder that audiences stayed away in droves from Brian De Palma's angry "Redacted," in which U.S. soldiers are rapists and murderers, and "Rendition," in which Reese Witherspoon discovers her husband is being tortured by the CIA as a terrorism suspect? (The exception to the flop list is "The Kingdom," a modest box-office success with Jamie Foxx, which was marketed as a straight action movie.)
"The Hurt Locker" is not without its political content. The movie opens with a scene involving a robotic mine sweeper that might as well be a rover on the surface of Mars as it trundles along a dusty Iraqi road; the alien aspect of the enterprise is reinforced when the soldier who is going to disarm the bomb dons the type of protective body suit that most of us see only on astronauts in space movies. The message seems clear: This is not a place we were meant to be. That idea is reinforced by the sign on the back of the unit's Humvee: "Caution Stay 11 Meters Back or You Will Be Shot" -- a slogan hardly calculated to win hearts and minds.
In a later scene, a soldier says "I'm sorry" to an Iraqi who is about to die. The moment is brief, but the apology seems to refer to more than this particular incident.
But the movie is genuinely appreciative of the professionalism -- the heroism, if you will -- of the soldiers. "Good job," one says to another, after a particularly intense situation has been resolved; as in a Howard Hawks movie, that is the highest praise possible.
It's praise that Bigelow, too, deserves. As a female director who specializes in "masculine" action/genre films (such as the 1987 vampire cult classic, "Near Dark," and the crazy 1991 bank-robbing surfers story, "Point Break"), Bigelow has been the subject of many admiring articles by writers amazed that someone with near-fashion model looks could rival the boys at their own bang-bang-blow-'em-up games. Much of "The Hurt Locker" is shot (on location in Jordan) with a documentary-style shaky-camera "realism" that is new to Bigelow's feature film work; what isn't new is the director's confident control of the material.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Bigelow appreciates that slow-motion, extreme close-ups and other visual tricks are most effective when used sparingly, for emphasis. A scene -- inspired by such previous desert-siege war movies as John Ford's "The Lost Patrol" (1934) and "Sahara" (1943) -- in which the unit is pinned down behind a dune by several snipers is a model of storytelling economy and visual efficiency that should be studied by aspiring young Memphis moviemakers; props and costumes aside, there's little in the scene that couldn't be staged for almost no expense on a West Memphis sandbar.
"The Hurt Locker" is at Malco's Ridgeway Four.
-- John Beifuss, 529-2394
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