The Hype Locker

Rating: 2/10 (2 March 2010)

Sorry, but I'm not drinking the new Kool Aid flavor of the month and hoping on board one of the hundreds of band wagons crammed with movie loving folks praising The Hurt Locker to the high heavens. Hats off to Bigelow for getting a slick film up on the screen for 11 million dollars (if that was indeed the true cost), but I'm stunned at the critical and public acclaim that this film has garnered. Twenty minutes into this implausible, almost laughingly inaccurate movie I was dying for the whole cast to wind up on the wrong side of the mother of all IED's so I could retreat for the theater exit. What's the problem? I think I know. In our mediocre, pop culture infused world of contemporary film-making, movie lovers and critics alike adore their roller coaster rides in the darkness of their local cinema or the comfort of their living rooms with their precious screener copies blasting away on their big screens. Ms. Bigelow tosses about all her primitive, macho infused, adrenaline rushing film techniques to keep her audience on the edge of their seats and turns an otherwise formulaic story with cookie cutter characters and tired predictable plot lines into something everybody thinks they should love. The setting in wartime Iraq seems to give this movie some sort of intelligent and moral high ground that it should sit on a cinematic pedestal as a gripping and defining film of the conflict. What utter nonsense. This film is so divorced from reality. Current and former soldiers of the Iraq War have roundly criticized it as a piece of Hollywood drivel. And well they should slam it for all the posturing and posing it has been doing lately on the red carpet. Shame on director Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal for dressing up a serious and deadly affair in history with all the usual Hollywood dramarama fluff and candy, letting the public lap it up and calling it entertainment. Their small minded talents and simplistic material was better suited for Lethal Weapon 5 or Point Break 2. And shame on the public for not taking the time and energy to educate themselves on even the most basic realities of the war in Iraq and wander out of the theater as I did, shaking their heads and wondering when someone's going to start making movies that avoid the amusement park and entertain us with intelligence and keen observation.