A defuser of improvised explosives takes up the difficult challenge

Rating: 9/10 (27 December 2010)

What had introduced me to "The Hurt Locker" was the scene in a former Michael Moore movie, "Fahrenheit 9-11", where 2 army personnel inside Iraq try to probe sand to check for an improvised explosive device under a tree, or IED, until suddenly...the device explodes with the two guys being hit by it at near point-blank range! They survive.
And that brave director, Kathryn Bigelow, who got a least one Oscar for "The Hurt Locker," helped to imagine us going deeper into war-torn Iraq, where a step on any bump in the sand or any anomaly in the sand, or if a military vehicle like a Humvee passes under them, means that they could fall into the deadly trap of the newest type of land mines since World War II.
Trailers for "The Hurt Locker" focused on a bomb tech (the main character of the film) wearing a designed suit whose job is to defuse those newest and tricky explosives that still make news in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. In "Armageddon", we hear the word "remote detonation", which literally means you detonate a bomb by remote control (in "The Hurt Locker", the bomb tech calls this "remote det" for short) and this correlates with the first explosion of "The Hurt Locker" when the bomb tech cuts several detonation cords (which in the movie he calls "det cord") in a suspected improvised explosive, and then, 100 meters away, a guy holds the remote control in a form of a cell phone in his hand. 3 of the watch-outs who protected the bomb tech quickly realize that he is the initiating system for the bomb. They say to the bad guy, "Drop the phone! Drop the phone!", but the guy refuses. The tech hears those audibles and realizes that he has to get out fast...with his gear as heavy as carrying a large backpack already filled up. You probably know that the bomb will blow up and it did....The tech runs, runs, and then, the bad guy presses the button and remote-detonates the bomb and then, Kathryn focuses on the photo speed as the sandy geyser from the detonation ensues....starting at slow speed (probably 4 times), and then to regular speed as the bomb tech gets engulfed by the blast wave and smoke from the explosion. I am wondering why Kathryn keeps slow photo speeds in the film to a minimum.
The scene where a bomb tech tries to defuse a suicide bomber reminds me of a quote from the movie "Speed." The suicide bomber, I guess, according to that past movie, has "enough dynamite in his chest to blow a building in half." The bomber did not want to set off his explosives and did not wish to die, but he warned the tech...he had a timer. The bomb tech warned his lookouts to set a 75-meter perimeter away from the bomber. The tech saw the timer and regrettably had about 3 minutes to defuse the bombs. He used a bolt cutter to cut some of the locks but because of the case-hardened steel, he could could only cut only one of the locks, and it was too late for the tech. The tech had to let him go and run and let him, regrettably, blow himself up, and he did. I learned a lesson at that point...that sometimes, in defusing bombs, in a few cases, you have to make a tough choice of not defusing when the situation warrants.
The only miss is that the finale--the scene involving the tech and the suicide bomber--had no gradual buildup towards the finale, but I can accept it gracefully, because Iraq can still become a pretty unpredictable place. Overall, I give the movie 3 1/2 stars if I were Roger Ebert.