Worth The Watch

Rating: 8/10 (26 April 2015)

The Hurt Locker is a movie about U.S. soldiers who are part of an Electronic Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit during the Iraq war. The movie focuses on the unit's leader Sergeant First Class William James, (played by Jeremy Renner). James is brought in as the unit leader after the previous leader was killed during an ordinance disposal. During his first operation with his new unit, it is clear that Sergeant James is an adrenaline junkie when he decides to use the EOD suit to disarm a bomb, instead of using the robot. All throughout the movie James displays a reckless attitude when faced with danger during his unit's various operations.
The movie shows how some people in certain fields develop an addiction to adrenaline rushes. Despite the high chance of death certain personality types will use a dangerous situation to get a sort of "high" off their own adrenaline. This premise reminded me of Eric Bana's character "Hoot" in the movie Black Hawk Down.
At times the movie has a documentary feel to it, using shaky cameras during action sequences to simulate that I was actually on the streets of Baghdad. This is one area of the film I defiantly noticed the influence that Mark Boal had on the cinematography. I found this technique annoying at times because it made some scenes hard to follow, but several times it helped draw me into the scene. Another technique that was utilized, often during the tense scenes where Sergeant James was defusing a bomb, was close ups. This brought focus on the action that Sergeant James was performing and resulted in extremely tense scenes. Many times after one of these tense scenes Sergeant James would crack a joke, and the entire feel of the movie. That was one thing I found enjoyable about Jeremy Renner's acting. He made the transition from super focused ordnance tech to sarcastic joker in just a matter of seconds.
Overall The Hurt Locker lacks a solid plot, it just depicts a few man going from mission to mission while their rotation slowly gets closer to its end, although the movie had a rather simple theme, I would still highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good war movie.