This was fine

Rating: 7/10 (22 February 2012)

I'll say this for The Hurt Locker: it sure knows how to make a bomb-defusing sequence work, an area where most movies get bogged down in "red wire or blue wire?" nonsense. There's simultaneously an incredible tension and a puzzle-solving glee to these scenes that make them absolutely electric, and makes me think that this could have been a pretty good action movie -- hell, the maverick lead/straight-laced sidekick dynamic is lifted straight from Lethal Weapon. Unfortunately, when the actual shooting starts Bigelow's craftsmanship kind of gets consumed in a hail of loud noises and shakycam.
But unfortunately this is a Serious Film, not an action movie, so we have to get a bunch of by-the-numbers character development scenes and theme-summarizing epigraphs. The main issue with this is that the film doesn't really have a lot of quote-unquote big ideas. There are only so many times you can watch Jeremy Renner go off and do something risky on his own while Anthony Mackie yells at him.
There's also something here that isn't really a flaw in the individual film, but more in the emerging discourses and narratives of the Iraq war: it's exclusively a story about Americans going Over There, and the traumatic experiences that the soldiers suffer, with the experiences of Iraqis completely removed. In this film we have a manipulatively-used street vendor kid, but other than that the Iraqis are all just Others, mysterious and dangerous brown faces that just might have a detonator on them. Again, it's not that Bigelow had to address every facet or perspective of the war in her film, but I'm worried that, as with Vietnam, America will end up turning an atrocity done to another nation into its own personal turmoil.
I don't want to make it sound like this is a bad film, because it's not -- in fact, it doesn't really have anything that can be identified as a flaw. But even while watching it I felt kind of detached, and it failed to make any kind of impression on me afterwards. Maybe this just speaks to my intrinsic difficulty empathizing with good-looking soldiers, but despite its technical excellence, The Hurt Locker just doesn't leave the impact that great cinema does.