Loud, stupid and false

Rating: Null/10 (22 October 2011)

Plot: A cowboy bomb-disposal tech in the Iraq War endangers his comrades through his love of war.
The problem with this film is that it is stupid. It is essentially a series of set-pieces involving a war-happy EOD tech in Iraq. There was much hype about realism but this is rubbish. Every character is an archetype (cowboy hero, amiable black buddy, hick buddy) and their actions are pure Hollywood.
So, nobody can run a proper cordon (Iraqis get through cordons manned by soldiers twice). A 3 man EOD team searches and clears hostile buildings on their own. When engaged by a sniper out in the boondocks they indulge in a sniper duel that leaves a number of men dead, rather than just calling an airstrike on the place. Nobody accepts orders, everyone argues.
Meanwhile the hyper-kinetic camera work moves so swiftly and so often that it sucks the tension out of every scene. Only during the sniper scene, where there is room to breathe, does the film grip. Occasional flashes of visual brilliance - rust leaping off a car wreck during a bomb blast, the wire-festooned concrete buildings, a tech pulling a wire that reveals a half-dozen IEDs at his feet - are subsumed into the general mediocrity.
The script is a rambling mess that notably fails to develop, lacks any sort of goal and ultimately provides a rather banal conclusion: war's fun - well, who'd ha' thunk it? Ostensibly the whole thing is apolitical, which is itself a political stance. It's a chicken claim from a chicken script that prefers hyper-macho pretensions to serious thought.
The whole film rings false. Instead of watching this, watch a British TV series, low on heroics but high on drama, called "Danger UXB!".