The Dramatic But Ultimately Confusing Locker

Rating: 5/10 (16 June 2010)

Like most people, I chose to watch The Hurt Locker off the back of its pretty sizeable hype and because of the awards the film was showered with in early 2010. To be honest, I was expecting it to be pretty hard-going, gritty, shaky-camera-and-battle-scene-heavy stuff, not to mention dripping in political posturing. However, the film is not really any of these things and, for several reasons, is actually very average.
The first thing you notice about The Hurt Locker is that it doesn't actually have a recognisable story. I'm sure this is deliberate to a degree, but it is clear that failed attempts have been made to involve the viewer in the characters. Some fairly tepid dialogue and run-of-the-mill-TV-drama performances contribute greatly to this, and give the film a feel of something less than an award-winner. In fact, some of the tense and dramatic scenes in the film are very well engineered and look great – but the fact I didn't care much about the characters involved made the outcome of these sequences less important.
Other reviewers have noted that the film jumps around from dead-end storyline to dead-end storyline with no explanation. This is true. There is absolutely no reason for most of the diversions the film takes, and to be honest they're not even that interesting, both due to the lack of character development and their hackneyed tone. For example, a selection of scenes towards the end of the film when one of the main characters returns home to find he cannot connect with everyday life as he once did is both utterly pointless and completely unoriginal as a plot device and social message.
Overall, it is pretty obvious why this film has been rated highest on IMDb by the younger demographic. There is a good amount of action and plenty of visual drama for those less likely to be concerned with plot holes and phoned-in performances. For those of us who are more discerning however, this film lacks an awful lot and it is hard to see how it can have won the Oscar for Best Picture. Sound and editing? Fine. Screenplay? That's pushing it. Direction? Questionable at best. Best Picture? Definitely not.
That said, all of the above were better than in Avatar, which is possibly why The Hurt Locker did win. Still, Kathryn Bigelow must have some friends in high places to have achieved what she did with this, a fairly routine yet oddly disjointed effort.