Review of The Hurt Locker (2008) by Diego T — 17 Feb 2014

Originally, I thought that The Hurt Locker was a pretty generic and bland war movie. Upon a rewatch (this time at the behest of my friend, who has been butthurt over my dislike of it for six whole years), I still found it to be pretty bland,but nevertheless a much stronger film overall than I first thought. This movie definitely has the feel of a documentary, which is both its asset and its eventual downfall-- director Katherine Bigelow becomes so detached from the characters that she forgets to give them any emotional depth-- but the film is eventually salvaged by Jeremy Renner's career-making performance in the starring role and a story that is undeniably worth telling. It's not the Apocalypse Now of the Iraq War like some people are saying, but it's still not a bad movie.

The Hurt Locker stars Renner as a bomb defusal expert in Baghdad during the war in Iraq. During a couple of epic bomb defusal sequences, both of which showcase Renner's ability to be a friggin' badass without having to use a bow and arrow, he puts his squad in danger and takes unwarranted risks. However, Bigelow never goes too far, and always restricts his badassery to minor moments, like his cool and collected facial expressions while defusing a car bomb, or his ability to light up a cigarette after a near-death experience. The best part of his character is that, despite being a movie badass, he is still grounded in reality. No Live Free or Die Hard-style fighter jet sequences to be had here. However, the realism is undermined slightly by a scene in which one of the squad members (Anthony Mackie) suggests blowing Renner up in order to prevent the squad from being put in danger again. Okay, sure, we get that he's nervous about it. But forgive me if I don't see a military officer blowing up his commander. There's also a strangely surreal subplot in which Renner befriends a kid, finds his dead body, and then the kid comes back to life... or something... but fuck it. War is hell. We get it. Moving on.

The best part of The Hurt Locker is easily its story. Unlike other war films (cough cough Lone Survivor cough cough), it doesn't push a partisan agenda or force a message down the audience's throat. It just tells the story of what life is like day-to-day in occupied Baghdad. The first hour or so of the movie is actually quite great, showing individual days in extreme detail and sparing nothing. It starts out more like a serial adventure movie, actually, with a string of essentially unrelated bomb defusings, each more intense than the last. However, the problem with serials is that they have to end up having a unifying story throughout, and The Hurt Locker chooses an uninteresting subplot about Renner playing detective in downtown Baghdad as its way to hold the movie together. It's passable... but it could have been so, so much better.

The cinematography in this movie is (and I won't mince words here) shit. Sorry, but I've had enough of directors shaking their camera around at things and filming random stuff in slow-mo, pretending that it qualifies as an actual camera technique. Spoiler alert: It doesn't. The film does create some very good images (I know that the unwilling suicide bomber at the end of the movie will haunt me for some time), but at the end of the day, certain individual shots are more memorable than the movie as a whole. The slow-mo only really works once, when we see an IED go off at the very beginning of the film. After that, it just feels overused. And even when people are just talking, Bigelow shakes her camera around. Why? As the tension builds, she has nowhere to go. This not only holds back the nail-biting aspect of the movie, but the character development as well. Ugh, this movie could have been so much better.

Final Score for The Butthurt Locker: 6/10 stars. I definitely liked it a lot more this second time around, but it's still nowhere near the cinematic Christ that it's been purported to be. Like most other Best Picture winners, I feel that this film will be forgotten soon, and other great films of 2008 (In Bruges, anyone?) will take its place. Still, it was going up against Avatarded and the war crime known as Up for Best Picture, so I'm not sorry it won. But it tries way too hard to be a character study without actually giving the audience any development for the characters. Hey, guys in the military miss their wives! Never seen that one before. Still though, the film is worth a viewing, and is infinitely superior to Bigelow's follow-up, Zero Dark Shitty, which sucks dick. It's good... but it's not great.