Defuse It Like Beckham

Rating: 7/10 (11 March 2010)

Iraq. The present. American bomb disposal units lead by Jeremy Renner's character have the thankless task of defusing sneakily-planted bombs (IEDs or Improvised Explosive Devices) in the deserted streets of Baghdad. They put their lives on the line daily and put themselves through constant stress and danger.
In this movie, Iraq is as disorientating and its people as alien to the Americans as Vietnam and its people were back in the 1960s and 70s during that conflict. The black character Sanborn says at one stage: "They all look the same to us." This is a phrase that many GIs said about Asians back in 'Nam.
The first half of this movie is loaded with some of the most nerve-wracking scenes of sweat-soaked tension to hit the screen recently. Brilliantly shot and edited, they have a shaky-cam documentary quality with some cutaways to strange images caught on-the-fly (the cat with the injured paw limping away, the kids looking on from balconies and the mini-tornado in the desert).
Some of it doesn't ring true, particularly the boozy, homo-erotic horseplay back at the barracks. There is also an odd scene where a load of (incompetent?) British soldiers (including a cameo by a VERY well-known English actor) get killed by snipers and it's up to the heroic Americans to save their asses.
The second half becomes more predictable and sentimental, particularly the overdone speeches about having kids or the ludicrous lengths Renner's character goes to to try and save one. Renner was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar but he didn't particularly impress me, he's okay, nothing more.
This movie won the Best Picture Oscar recently and, for me, it's a double award for the troops out in Iraq and for the efforts of the filmmakers (just as Sean Penn's Oscar for "Milk" was really for the struggles of Harvey Milk and the gay community and for Penn's efforts).
"The Hurt Locker" is certainly a good film, but I don't think it's a great one and I'm not sure people will look back on it as a classic.