This was Best Picture?

Rating: 3/10 (18 January 2014)

Can I get my eyesight back?
I don't care about fancy cinematography or being tricksey as Gollum would say
This was tortuous viewing- if Renner had watched it with me, I'd still feel the same way
Cue the ominous music- what the audience doesn't know disarming bombs is dangerous work? Cue the scene of male camaraderie- forced as it was (only Renner took his shirt off- what the other guys couldn't?)
Cue the obligatory scene of the guys rationalizing why they are doing this
The 3 principals were typical screenplay 101- the arrogant prick, the guy who fellows rules regardless, the milquetoast fellow who broods over death. Guess which one Renner was?
The film was loud, unnecessarily so. If a bomb disposal expert(removing his protective gear) is going to Jesus as Sgt. James states, shouldn't he have sustained at minimum first degree burns on his uncovered hands?
Like Crowe in A Good Year, Renner doesn't play cute and cuddly well.
For all the laudatory praise heaped on this film, it was still a film about war , no more or less. There was nothing new added to the canon of war films or war themed cinema. For myself give me Das Boot, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima and Stop Loss- with these, the fellows who fought weren't anybody special. They were caught up doing this, whether they wanted to or not. And sometimes there is no answer for the why of war- it just is.
It was hard to be sympathetic since these bomb disposal guys volunteered.
Yet there was a moment near the end upon his return home, when Renner's Sargent James is at the supermarket- lost in the cereal aisle. And he says nothing and in that stilled nothingness, he was on his way to where he was. It is so very hard to do this and he does this so very well. Just as in Avengers, Legacy and MI4, it's him. For in that briefest of seconds, he elevated Locker and gave an understanding as to why.