The Hurt Locker

Directed By: Kathryn Bigelow

Written By: Mark Boal

Starring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, and Christian Camargo

Director of Photography: Barry Ackroyd, Editors: Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, Production Designer: Karl Juliusson, Original Music: Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders

Rated: R for war violence and language.

    In the opening scene of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, three soldiers discover a bomb right smack in the middle of Baghdad. But no fears—Guy Peace of Memento and LA Confidential is on the scene. He walks down the road like a hero in his huge bomb suit, and places the proper charges. But then something goes wrong—a man with a cell phone shows up, the soldier can’t make the shot, and the road blows to hell, with Pearce along for the ride. From there, all bets are off.

    There are many things that people have been calling The Hurt Locker—apolitical, a great Iraq war movie, a chilling psychological study—but I think the most proper one would be to call it the best damn action movie in a long time. Alfred Hitchkock always said that suspense was having a bomb that didn’t go off—call Ms. Bigelow the mistress of suspense then.

    Ms. Bigelow has always focused on men and their comradery in films like Point Break or K-19: The Widowmaker in sort of fashion that reminds me of Howard Hawks. Her men are professionals and live for the job—yet The Hurt Locker offers the kind of job that one doesn’t just apply for down the street: an EOD tech bomb squad disposal team in Iraq. The film is based on journalist Mark Boal’s time in Baghdad with a tech squad in 2004, who developed the script after spending time with these men. Mr. Boal opens his screenplay with a quote that tells us “war is a drug,” and then thoroughly explains the joys and costs of that meaning.

    A standard group movie could not suffice, so Mr. Boal and Ms. Bigelow instead focus on a curveball: Staff Sergeant Will James, played by Jeremy Renner. James is the bomb disposal equivalent of a crack addict—he lives off the fear and the energy, and hungers it. This comes to the dismay of his two comrades (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, both very good), who are simply trying to get by their last 38 days. Renner has played a soldier before in the apocalyptic zombie world of 28 Weeks Later, but here he develops both a machismo and dark and dry humor that energizes the film. When James comes upon the latest machination to blow up Baghdad, Renner gives a grin instead of a gasp (Mr. Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, and David Morse, alumni of Ms. Bigelow’s other work, fill in nice cameo roles).

    But as much as Renner is a revelation, it’s still Ms. Bigelow who steals the show. Shooting in Amman, Jordan on 16mm (and with United 93 cinematographer Barry Ackroyd behind them), Ms. Bigelow delivers on set piece after set piece. She relies on real dangers, and real thrills instead of CGI. More often than not, the end to a sequence is a sigh of relief more than a ball of fire (though they appear a few times). Ms. Bigelow concentrates on the details—the sand and sweat that cover a soldier’s face, the rumbles of the ground from an explosion, and the simplistic line between life and death. She’s willing to milk a scene for all its worth, not because she’s an action junkie, but she gives you the real experience.

    Although the word Iraq has to come up in this film, mapping The Hurt Locker in with other recent films like Redacted or In the Valley of Elah is simply meaningless. Not because Ms. Bigelow and Mr. Boal don’t have their own stance, but because they keep it more for the audience to decide and use images to suggest their own side. No soldier stands moralizing about the causes and ends of the war, but the constant repetition of the whole procedural shows the futility of the cause.

    But then again, the question at the heart of the narrative is what drives Sergeant James to suit up and put himself closer to death than anyone else in the world? In a telling scene, Mr. Renner stands in a cereal aisle in a grocery store back home. Choosing a wire is easy, but which kind of Cheerios? Get out of here.  Ms. Bigelow understands her man, and through her film, gives him one action-packed ride.