From One Female's Perspective, Tooth-Grindingly Dull

Rating: 6/10 (2 February 2010)

The Hurt Locker is one of those testosterone-driven movies that seems to have fallen over the sharp edge of the Great Male-Female Divide, landing firmly in man-land. Despite having been directed by a woman, the film offers virtually nothing that women tend to seek in movies: characterization, story, back-story, beauty, visual interest, irony, hope, subtlety, redemption, etc. I'm sure some women will disagree with me, but it is inescapable that nearly all the mainstream, OTT praise has come from male critics.
Instead, IMHO, The Hurt Locker offers unremittingly tense - and eventually tedious - expositions of attempted and successful bomb defusions filmed largely (and nauseatingly) with shaky, hand-held cameras. That's it. That's the whole thing. The characters react to the bomb defusion efforts and each others' reactions to those efforts, and occasionally worry about Iraqi insurgents that may be targeting them. To blow off steam, the soldiers beat each other up. (Really? Perhaps men understand that sort of thing, but women mostly don't get it, and certainly don't think it's entertaining.) All in all, I would never have guessed that a film about exploding ordnance could be so tooth-grindingly dull.
I read that director Kathryn Bigelow based the story on the accounts of a freelance journalist who was embedded in a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, so perhaps what resonates with male viewers is a certain "authenticity" of the war experience that is offered by this fictional re- telling. But "authentic" does not always equal "interesting," and so it was here.
But that's OK - nothing in the film was entertaining. While the acting was sound and dedicated, the actors were given very little to work with. The high point of actorly expression was a scene in which the two leads had to let flies crawl into their mouths, eyes and noses while lying motionlessly in ambush. That must have taken some grim dedication to the craft.
Had this been a documentary, it might have had resonance based on the unscripted and often chaotic nature of efforts to film reality as it is happening, particularly in a war context. But in case anyone has lost track of this fact, the director set up, shot and approved every scene in this film, and then edited them together. So although it may include kernels of real events, those kernels have been processed as extensively as corn kernels are processed for breakfast cereal, and with the same sub-nutritious result.
And of course, neither the movie nor its characters ever ask the ultimate question, "What the heck are we doing in Iraq defusing bombs, anyway?"