Awesome Iraq War Movie

Rating: 10/10 (19 January 2010)

"The Hurt Locker" lives up to its title. It is all about HURT as we follow a reckless Army Sergeant during a tour of duty in Iraq where he defuses enemy bombs. Director Kathryn Bigelow, whose movies include the superlative vampire movie "Near Dark" (1987), the action-packed crime thriller "Point Break" (1991), and the unusual sci-fi thriller "Stranger Days" (1995), does a bang-up job capturing the atmosphere and characters caught up in Iraq. "The Hurt Locker" isn't a beer & pizza movie that will make you laugh. Instead, it is a riveting drama that may make you cry, especially if you have served overseas in the military in the Middle East. At two hours and ten minutes, "The Hurt Locker" is a lengthy movie, but Bigelow doesn't squander a second and there is nothing that could have been deleted. Some familiar faces show up for cameo appearance, like Ralph Fiennes as a British contractor sent to defuse bombs.
SSgt. William James (Jeremy Renner of "28 Days Later") replaces Sgt. Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce of "L.A. Confidential") after he dies trying to neutralize an I.E.D., improvised explosive device, in an Iraq town. Sgt. JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie of "Notorious") does not get along with SSgt. James at first because James likes his job too much and derives an adrenaline thrill from being in dangerous predicaments. Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty of "Bobby") does not like the insane risks that James takes. In one scene, after he discovers that a parked car outside the UN building has been booby-trapped with enough explosives to kill everybody within a block, James shucks his 80 pounds of bomb disposal uniform gear and sets out disarming the home-made but ingenious explosives. Colonel Reed (David Morse of "The Rock") personally congratulates James for a job well-done and learns that James has disable over 800 bombs. The picture that Bigelow paints about the war in Iraq and the problems that the bomb disposal teams encounter is powerful stuff. At another point, James and company find a human bomb--i.e., a corpse with explosives concealed in its stomach--and James defuses it.
Lead actor Jeremy Renner is a revelation. He has a Steve McQueen presence about him and you believe everything that he does because he does it so well. Writer Mark Boal was an embedded journalist and he wrote the screenplay that pulls no punches and you will no blink if you get engrossed in this taunt melodrama. This independent production was lensed on location in the Middle-Eastern country of Jordan but an American distributor picked it up for an American theatrical release. The closet movie to this that I know about is the 1959 Robert Aldritch helmed saga "Ten Seconds to Hell" about defusing bombs in war-torn Germany.