A popcorn action flick pretending to be an intelligent human drama

Rating: 6/10 (10 January 2010)

Going into "The Hurt Locker," I was expecting an Oscar-worthy couple hours. Sadly, I was disappointed. This is a somewhat enjoyable film, but only if you remove the lenses of reality and treat it as a popcorn action movie that desperately wants to be more than it is.
At first, I liked the treatment of the Iraq war in a neutral way -- showing the gritty awfulness of war without descending into the political maelstrom surrounding the U.S. invasion. But with time, it just became more and more problematic for me. The Iraq war isn't neutral, and much of the reality was lost with the superficial stereotyping of both sides in an attempt to steer clear of controversy.
The bigger problem for me, though, was the ridiculousness of the squad's behavior. I have no military experience or family or friends, but this just looked all wrong right from the beginning. Reading many of the comments on here, it seems actual military folks agree. No bomb squad works this way, and most of the "tense" scenes were terrifically unrealistic. They also had zero suspense for me, as the filmmakers telegraphed what was going to happen every time.
Where I thought the movie worked was as an abstract piece of human drama. Jeremy Renner gives a great performance, as do his co-stars. And if you let all the realism problems go and watch the movie for what it appears the filmmakers were trying to say -- that the ugliness of war creates both an adrenaline need and a fatalism that allows increasingly dangerous risk-taking -- the movie is kind of enjoyable.
I find that theme fairly flaccid as a real commentary on war, though -- and especially impotent as a portrayal of the Iraq war, of all things.
There are great war movies that reveal the horror and human drama of war while being realistic, acknowledging the truth and lies in foreign policy and still avoiding polemics. This is not one of those films.