Review: The Hurt Locker

Distant fireworks—all a little too distant in The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow's tremendously-hyped Hurt Locker seems to be such because of its status as an Iraq War film—a genre which has had its fair share of hit or miss. On its own, however, The Hurt Locker leaves some-little-thing to be desired. All of the parts are there: great characters, a great story, and a great cast to see it through, but director Kathyrn Bigelow keeps the bomb defused, the fireworks distant, and really just something out of wack in what could've been the Full Metal Jacket for a new millennium.

Adrenaline junkie (Point Break, anyone?) William James, played by Jeremy Renner, fills in for a team leader (one of the cameo trifecta of Guy Pearce, David Morse, and Ralph Fiennes) of an elite bomb squad working the streets of Iraq mid-war 2004. Listening to metal and disobeying his team members, James is soon deemed a "wild man" by a witnessing superior (another cameo, so fun), and from there the stage is set.

Though periodically predictable, the story is nonetheless filled with realistically brutal and brutally realistic sequences that really are one of a kind. The sniper showdown, dragged out and ever so quiet, is particularly fresh, and also memorable is a wholly unnerving scene involving a taxi. But even with this great material at hand, something—strangely—seems a bit off. The opening grabber fails to grab, a decent, semi-ambient score is underused, the random slow-mo inserts feel recycled from Three Kings, and so on. In other words, for how inspired the concept and material are, the execution, again, seems anything but.

Jeremy Renner and his two compatriots (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) hold most of the screentime and do so admirably. They look the part and they act the part; their performances fit seamlessly with the material. The aforementioned cameos add some star power to the film.

Somewhere within the shaky cams, digital zoom-ins, and the drawn-out-to-real-time action pieces, a good, if not great film is hiding. Bigelow's stylistic decisions seem to adhere almost by default to the digitial/handheld/bleak/shaky/doc style of the new millennium, waning and bottoming out the tension and ultimately dulling the so-called action picture as a whole. Like its focal explosives, The Hurt Locker is defused, but oh so close to being an explosion.


** out of ****

~ Patrick Fryberger