Failing to get real

Rating: 6/10 (10 January 2013)

Director Kathryn Bigelow tried to sell The Hurt Locker as a raw, gritty and above all else realistic look at the war in Iraq. In watching the film the problem with that becomes glaringly obvious. The film is not realistic at all. Bigelow strove for authenticity and missed the mark by a considerable distance. The characters in her story act in ways they simply could not and would not in the real world. Things are presented to us in this film which quite simply could not happen. By the time the main character is taking a solo nighttime sojourn through the streets of Baghdad the film has gone completely off the rails. It's ludicrous. And yet it manages to get even more ludicrous from there. Honestly, this deadly serious war movie ends up being somewhat laughable.
The story focuses on a bomb disposal unit. The danger of their work is made quite clear to us right from the start. Coming in to lead the three-man team is William James and here the movie begins to lose its way. James is a gung-ho, yahoo cowboy type who ignores the rules, unnecessarily putting himself and his team in danger. The kind of guy who, in the real world, would never be given this job. Rightly frustrated to no end by James is his by-the-book comrade JT Sanborn. The third member of the team is the young, impressionable Owen Eldridge who just wants to get out of Iraq alive. The interactions between James, Sanborn and Eldridge are at the heart of the movie. The conflicts which arise between James and Sanborn are quite powerful and compelling. But there's the nagging sense that none of it rings true. No bomb disposal unit would actually operate in the way this team does. No way.
This is a story which you would think would be fraught with tension, a bomb ready to explode at any moment. But you never really feel that. The film moves from one bomb to the next, the tension slowly draining away. It becomes rather repetitive and not particularly entertaining. Once the film really gets going you never get the sense it's going to shock you. And it's a film which could really use a good jolt. Some of the "action" sequences are frankly interminable. The film's better moments are really spent away from the ticking bombs, getting to know something about the key characters and what drives them to be the men that they are. Jeremy Renner performs the role of James wonderfully and is ably matched by Anthony Mackie playing Sanborn. And Brian Geraghty, playing Eldridge, has his moments too. These three actors are probably the best thing the film has going for it. The actors are better than the story. The story just isn't believable, by the end downright farcical. The central character of James is a fascinating one. Just not a believable one. With a character it is impossible to buy into at its heart the film was never going to be able to truly succeed. It is a decent film, but one with serious flaws. A film which does not live up to its acclaim.