The suspense sequences are awesome

Rating: 9/10 (12 July 2009)

War/action drama about an American bomb squad in the Iraq war. The film is extremely apolitical - the Iraq setting is almost incidental. The themes and incidents could, except for the technology involved and some of the elements of the suspense (notably that the fact that the enemy is made up of Iraqi insurgents, and it's difficult to tell the enemy apart from anyone else), this could just as easily have been about a police bomb squad or one in any other war. What makes The Hurt Locker special is its suspense sequences. God, it's been a long time since any Hollywood action director got suspense right. Bigelow takes the old Hitchcock maxim about the ticking of the bomb being more exciting than the explosion to its logical extremes. There are a handful of bomb diffusion sequences in the film, and they are all very tense (there's also a sequence where the group, along with some British allies, are pinned down by snipers, that is reminiscent of Ford's The Lost Patrol). It can be a very impressive film, and in a summer overrun by idiotic movies like X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, it's not at all surprising that so many critics have declared this a masterpiece. It's not, though. The main problem is that the human story surrounding the action/suspense setpieces is nothing special. Jeremy Renner plays the new leader of this squad, with his two veteran assistants, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. They lost their previous Sergeant through carelessness, and they are eager to protect the new guy. But Renner is an adrenaline junkie. He dares what no one else will (screw robots! I'll march right up to that bomb without a second thought!). There is a lot of tension between the three men because of this. Meanwhile, Renner wonders how he can ever return to normal life with his wife (Evangeline Lily) and young son without the excitement of the field. There's also a subplot about a young Iraqi boy Renner befriends who disappears. The stuff around the setpieces isn't necessarily bad, it's just not exceptional. I could also complain a little about the action sequences themselves. They are definitely exciting, but, if you think them through, they don't seem too realistic. For instance, in the opening sequence, when the first Sergeant is approaching a bomb, Geraghty sees a butcher across the street pull out his cell phone. Geraghty yells at him to put it down, but hesitates in taking a shot. Yeah right. This guy would be dead the second he pulled out that phone (and he should be; there's no room for mistakes in this kind of situation). You would really hope the real guys in this situation would be much more careful than Renner is. If these exceptionally trained individuals weren't that trained, you'd think they'd all be dead by now. And in the sniper sequence, when one British sniper gets waxed, Mackie grabs his gun and seemingly goes to the exact same spot to snipe. What? I won't at all be surprised to see a ton of technical debunkings of this film as it becomes more popular. I've already seen a few on the film's IMDb board. Technical problems don't bother me too much, though, and I still quite enjoyed the movie.