Hurt Locker isn't bad, just not very good.

Rating: Null/10 (6 April 2010)

For a new movie about a war still going on, Hurt Locker reminds me a lot of any number of war movies I've seen over the last sixty years. A maverick who gets away with all kinds of unorthodox ways because he's so good at his dangerous task is a familiar character -- John Wayne played one in Sands of Iwo Jima, and there have been lots of others some of whom even defused unexploded bombs in WW II. I'm somewhat willing to grant all the unlikely incidents for the sake of a good story. My basic complaint is that it's not very well-done as a story. The movie is essentially a string of incidents not tied well with each other. They could be arranged in almost any order without much changing the movie. And some of them strike me as most unlikely, even for a maverick skilled at his trade. And most of them just come to an end, stop, with no real point. Specifically, the long section when the EOD team meets up with some civilian contractors and then gets into a sniping duel with insurgents just goes on . . . and on . . . and then it's sunset and everyone goes home. The point?