Review: The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker (2008)

starring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, Guy Pierce

dir. Kathrine Bigelow

This is my favorite film of the year so far. I've seen it twice and one of the most impressive things that a movie can do is maintain its tension on a second viewing. This film does that in spades.

It's like the Alfred Hitchcock theory on suspense. Show a person set a timer on a bomb and place it under a table. Then watch unsuspecting people sit down at the table and have a conversation. The audience will be on the edge of their seat wondering if the bomb will go off while the people sit there unknowingly. The Hurt Locker is a two hour version of that theory impeccably executed.

This is a film that also works on quite a few levels. Yes, it's an indictment of war and the soldiers on the ground. it is a film about urban warfare and how everyone is suspect. It's a film about decisions and how one wrong move can have great effect on everyone around you. But at it's heart, it is about addiction. This is a movie that uses the war genre as a metaphor for addictive behavior and how that will not only kill the abuser, but leave a trail of wreckage that the abuser never even acknowledges that he or she is responsible for.

Our addict in this case is Jeremy Renner giving an amazing performance as Staff Sergeant William James, the head of a bomb disposal unit. He's an adrenaline junkie, always looking for the next hit to supply those endorphins that keep him up. What really makes his performance so great is his willingness to remain completely ignorant of what is really going on inside of him. There are a few moments of clarity, but they pass, because he's a junkie and junkies only love one thing... Junk.

One of the better and very understated moments in this movie is his "quest for revenge". He ventures out of the base, after curfew, to look for the people responsible for killing a young boy he befriended. His pacing, nervous ticks and chain smoking feel and take on the appearance of a junkie looking for a hit. It's uncanny, but fits in so well within the context of the war film that it could easily be overlooked. This entire sequence isn't about revenge, but about the rush and when Renner's character discovers there will be no rush, his dealer is dry, he slinks away settling for a moment of physical abuse done to him by unknowing soldiers.

Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty are pitch perfect as soldiers who see the danger of their situation and can't get out of it. They understand that one wrong decision could get them killed and are frightened by the addict that leads them, but also have a certain admiration and want to be more like him.

Bigelow is at the top of her game as she builds sequences that are taut and riddled with tension on all sides. There isn't a single moment when you don't feel that something could go wrong or someone could easily die. It's filmmaking at its finest and Bigelow proves she is not only a great female filmmaker, but better than other action directors like the incompetent Michael Bay or the clueless Mc G. Though I do suspect that Bay has quite a few things in common with Renner's Staff Sergeant.

Maybe with the Academy upping the number of best picture nominees, this film will break through and find the much larger audience that it deserves. It's genre filmmaking with a heart and a head that outweighs anything that has come out this summer and will easily be up there at the end of the year.

10 out of 10