This thing beat Avatar? Not in my book!

Rating: 5/10 (26 April 2010)

I truly wanted to love this film, but alas, 'twas not to be. Not to get off on a tangent, but the fact that this film beat James Cameron's Avatar simply boggles the mind. It had to be some kind of political force to make that happen.
The Hurt Locker is a tedious, unrealistic and plodding film about an EOD (bomb squad) team in Iraq. According to this film, these squads work completely independent of the rest of the military, make up their own missions and don't really answer to anyone for foolhardy, illogical actions in the field. Simple common sense was thrown out the window at nearly every turn in this movie and the characters did the stupidest, most irrational things that defied explanation. This was not a true testament to the men and women who serve the United States in a military capacity.
The story, if you can call it that, revolves around three members of the EOD team: Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), an adrenalin junkie cowboy, Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), a by-the-book man that keeps his emotions in check at all times, and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) a rookie who constantly looks to his superiors for guidance and is obsessed with death. We follow these three men on mission after mission, trying to discern what the hell is going as we look on through the myopic lens of the almighty shaky-cam, a little cinematic trick to try to make things look edgier and more realistic; this is a trick I grew tired of long ago. There was just too damn much camera movement and too many nauseating close-ups for my taste. I felt like I was watching Hancock all over again - but without the entertainment value. The loose excuse for a plot leaves us meandering through one tense little situation after another until the tension was non-existent and I just didn't care anymore - not that I cared to begin with. The characters are all stock cliché's and the development of those cardboard cutouts was practically nowhere to be seen. They just were.
The entire film boiled down to the main character, Sergeant James, being ridiculously foolish and being completely dismissive of the guidelines for his job. He had no problem putting his team into unnecessarily dangerous situations just to fuel his own needs for...whatever his need were. His was uncharacteristically nonmilitary in his thinking and seemed to care only about himself. Military men do not think that way, and if they did, wars would be a lot shorter and much more bloodier.
There were some glaring inaccuracies regarding the way in which the military functions and these guys would have been court-martialed on a daily basis. Other reviewers have covered the worst problems with this film but I'll just repeat that there didn't really seem to be any direction to their missions and things just seemed to happen. The actors all did fine jobs, but I implore anyone who wants to watch this film to not think that this is how the military really is. 'Cause it just ain't so. My grade: D