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| Released: |
2009 |
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| Genre: |
WAR
ACTION
DRAMA
THRILLER
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
123 |
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MIXED Reviews
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| | | The loosely structured narrative unfolds as a series of nail-biting set pieces: The dismantling of a few particularly fraught IEDs; an agonizing sniper shootout in the desert; a haphazard attempt at retribution for the apparent killing of a young boy. Bigelow stages these episodes with an extraordinary combination of patience and panache. The rhythm of slow buildup followed by violent release recalls Sergio Leone, but without the giddy Morricone score to mediate the discomfort. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the film wrings more suspense out of the buzzing of a fly around a man’s face than perhaps any since Once Upon a Time in the West.) In sequence after sequence, you’d have difficulty cutting the tension with a chainsaw... The movie’s political reticence is an almost unspeakable relief after the gaudy hectoring of such films as Redacted, Lions for Lambs, and In the Valley of Elah. But ultimately it is a limiting factor as well. As it suggests at the outset, The Hurt Locker is the story of an addict, but the film itself is complicit in the addiction. Even when James’s exploits are revealed to be fruitless or destructive or outright pathological, Bigelow never quite finds the distance to put a moral frame on them. James is what he is, and the film ultimately seems undecided on whether this is a good or a bad thing. Still, even as it fails to acquire the narrative gravity for which one might hope, The Hurt Locker is an exceptional work of filmmaking and easily among the best movies of the year to date. Like her protagonist, Bigelow is both a meticulous technician and a ballsy showoff. And, like him, she has ice water in her veins. | | | (Christopher Orr, New Republic) | | | It's not hard to suss out the message of The Hurt Locker, as it begins with this quotation from New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug." Then, just to be sure, all the words except "WAR IS A DRUG" fade from the screen. That's the only un-subtle moment in Kathryn Bigelow's otherwise sharp film, a tight, suspenseful action drama that happens to be set in Baghdad in 2004. Like almost every film about the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker is about war in general, not this specific one, and even at that it's as much about the mechanics of battle as the psychology of it. It's a film about a squad of bomb technicians, the men who have to decide whether to cut the red wire or the blue wire. Even a semi-competent filmmaker could turn that into something entertaining, and Bigelow - director of such masculine films as Point Break, Strange Days, and K-19: The Widowmaker - takes it further, adding haunting emotional resonance to the surface-level thrills... Yet still there remains, for me, something missing. I've seen the film twice and failed both times to receive the "ineffable tingle at the base of my spine," as Roger Ebert puts it, that separates a very good film from a great one. It might be that the sequence where James searches for answers about what happened to the Iraqi boy who calls himself Beckham (Christopher Sayegh) seems like a blind alley, plot-wise, and my befuddlement with it has prevented me from adoring the film as much as I would like to. Whatever the case, The Hurt Locker is indeed very, very good, as tense and compelling an action drama as you're liable to see all year. | | | (Eric D. Snider, World of Eric) | | | Given the public’s reluctance to confront present-day reality, the string of unsuccessful movies — and TV series — on the Iraq War will probably continue with The Hurt Locker. That’s a pity, since while it doesn’t match the classic films about previous conflicts, it reinforces Kathryn Bigelow’s proficiency as an action director and offers a striking, if incomplete, portrait of a man enamoured of the rush posed by physical danger. Less impressive as a whole than it is in its parts, it’s still a provocative, well-crafted picture set in the still-ongoing occupation... The problem with this last act material is that it never manages to bring the character’s psyche into clear focus: is he identifying the Iraqi boy — whom he apparently mistakes for another — with his own son, for instance? Or is he confusedly using his inarticulate anger as a justification for blood-lust? Perhaps that’s inevitable, and the point is that the motivation behind the kind of extreme machismo James represents is mysterious and unreachable. But such a realization doesn’t make The Hurt Locker any more dramatically satisfying in the end. | | | (Frank Swietek, One Guy’s Opinion) | | | Of the many dramatic movies that have been made about Iraq, The Hurt Locker, which is about Army bomb-squad technicians in Baghdad, is the only one that conveys with the utmost vividness a documentarylike immediacy. The director, Kathryn Bigelow, shot with four lightweight cameras, and the imagery is rarely still. The jitteriness is appropriate for a world where everything can suddenly blow to smithereens... By placing such a premium on docu-realism, Bigelow limits herself. If the convolutions of James's character had truly been measured, she would have had to radically alter her in-your-face stylistics and risk the land mines of in-depth psychological dramaturgy. But then she might have made a great film instead of a really good one. | | | (Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor) | | | Before I went to see it, I had heard from more than one source that The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, was the best movie about Iraq yet made. This is true, though only because the competition is so pathetically feeble. It begins with an epigraph by Chris Hedges, ending with the assertion that "War is a drug."... It’s true that The Hurt Locker is respectful to our soldiers and does not regard them as either dupes or victims, but it is still enmeshed in the Hollywood culture, and it has (albeit only implicitly) the other Iraq movies’ assumption that their mission is pointless and self-defeating. For all its authenticity, then, the movie is in this sense unreal, since it recognizes no reason for the things that its characters do except for the thrill of doing them. I know that this emphasis on the absurdity and the horror of war has a long and venerable history in the movies. Probably it is also true that a lot of real-life soldiers have learned from the movies not to be such a sap as to talk about what Frank Capra, in a different movie universe, used to call "Why We Fight." But to insist upon their existential authenticity to the exclusion of any sense of why the war is being fought in the first place is a distortion of reality in an entirely predictable direction. It’s not just the senior officers here who are fools or knaves but, presumably, the whole command structure and the politicians back in Washington who have decided to send these men into action for no apparent reason. Now where have we heard of something like that before? | | | (James Bowman, jamesbowman.net) | |
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Sgt. J. T. Sanborn Anthony Mackie 
