Tough thriller with no heart

Rating: 5/10 (20 August 2015)

An epic-length film chronicling the complex, confusing, and sheer frustrating decade-long hunt for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, ZERO DARK THIRTY is directed Kathryn Bigelow's follow up to the masterful THE HURT LOCKER. Unfortunately this turns out to be a middling production that's just not in the same league as its predecessor.
The nature of the problem seems to lie in the script, which struggles to make a decent storyline out of lots of chaotic and seemingly disconnected events. The nature of the hunt is a long and ultra-slow one, and it doesn't help that the viewer has no characters to connect with. Jessica Chastain won all the plaudits for her role in the lead as the woman who simply refuses to give up the hunt for what might well be a bogeyman, but her acting consists of blank-faced staring for much of the running time and I didn't warm to her at all.
What ZERO DARK THIRTY becomes is a string of loosely-connected set-pieces, some of which are fantastic, others less so. The torture stuff seems rather interminable and too heavy-handed in its efforts to make a political point; on the other hand, the scenes with Jennifer Ehle are handled very well. The movie as a whole is technically proficient but it lacks bite and heart; there's no suspense or excitement here, even at the climax, which should be palm-sweatingly tense. The male characters are reduced to macho posturing (Chris Pratt, Joel Edgerton, Jason Clarke, Mark Strong) and Bigelow seems to focus more on providing distracting cameos (Scott Adkins, Edgar Ramirez, James Gandolfini, Stephen Dillane, John Barrowman) than making a truly remarkable film.