Movie review: The Hurt Locker

by John P. Meyer

Even though I'm a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow's work, I somehow contrived to miss her latest -- The Hurt Locker -- at both its SXSW and AFI Dallas appearances. (Such are the expediencies of film festival coverage.)

But I'm all better now, because I've finally screened the movie in anticipation of its North Texas theatrical release this Friday (July 10). And I'm really glad I did, because it's a gripping action thriller set in war-torn urban Iraq (with Amman, Jordan standing in quite convincingly for filmmaking purposes). Furthermore, its main characters represent some of the most finely-drawn, memorable and tragically flawed individuals to be featured in a war movie in a long, long time.

Right off the bat Bigelow establishes the theme of the film by leading the opening scene with this epigram:

War is a drug. (from Chris Hedges' book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning)

And damned if it isn't, particularly for a guy like Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner, in a breakout, heroic performance), who steps in to fill the - um - recently vacated shoes of a bomb disposal technician. James joins the remaining members of a team tasked with clearing the streets of those dreaded improvised explosive devices (IEDs) which are responsible for so much death, dismemberment and emotional trauma.

But here's the thing about James: he's a little cocky out in the field, approaching a land mine or booby-trapped vehicle as if it were a child's erector set in need of rapid disassembly before the guests arrive in the living room -- in contrast to the last guy, who handled everything with kid gloves. (Until he didn't.)

James is a cowboy. He's a loose cannon. He scares the Hell out of his fellow squad members (Anthony Mackie as "by the book" Sgt. Sanborn; Brian Geraghty as obsessive SPC Eldridge), who are forced to work in support of his death-defying feats of defusement. But his nonchalant, nose-thumbing attitude towards the bomb-makers and their makings wins the high-profile respect of the company commander, Col. Reed (David Morse), who stops by just to shake a brave soldier's hand -- when he probably ought to be counseling him to follow protocol.

Sanborn has just lost a team member and would prefer not to lose another right away. So he has no qualms about attempting to discourage James' head-first, in-without-knocking style of bomb disposal. But the key word here is "attempting," as James shrugs off Sanborn's cautions and proceeds to do what he does best, sometimes using an intuitive approach to device neutralization in preference to the analytical one. He plays each new scenario by ear -- and they're all new, every one of 'em.

Eldridge begins each day by obsessing that it will be his last -- he KNOWS he is going to die, it's just a matter of which day of those remaining in his unit's rotation that his death will occur on. He's seeing Col. Cambridge (Christian Camargo), a priest-like battlefield psychologist, on a regular basis, but he doubts the relevance of the colonel's counsel given the fact that Camargo admits to having never actually visited the battle zone.

There's a potent scene early in James' assignment to the unit (but after he's established himself as a wild man) during which he and his teammates are exploding captured ordinance in the middle of the desert. There's a miscue, and James is hiking down to the blast zone to retrieve some work gloves he's left behind while Sanborn and Eldridge hang back. Sanborn suggests to Eldridge, sotto voce, that it would be so easy for an accident to happen -- the wires of their charges could become crossed while James was hovering around the blast site. At first, Eldridge (and we filmgoers) assume Sanborn is just shooting the breeze, making a joke -- but the more we study on it, and the longer Sanborn remains straght-faced, eyeing the remote trigger, the more convinced we become that he's serious. Deadly serious.

Off-duty, James runs into a young Iraqi peddling pirated DVDs to U.S. soldiers. He's too canny to play the role of a mark, but can't resist dropping a few dollars the kid's way. Eventually he challenges the youngster (who goes by "Beckham") to a bit of kickball, and they become cautious friends. It's a relationship that will come to have haunting implications for everyone involved.

As a change-of-pace interlude to the numerous nail-biting episodes of bomb disarmament in the city streets, we decamp to the desert for a nerve-wracking cat-and-mouse encounter with a sniper. James and his team, in their armored Humvee, have stumbled upon a group of British contract soldiers who've become stranded due to a flat tire: they've got a perfectly good spare, but no wrench, because one of them hurled it at a recalcitrant civilian. In the course of assisting this crew (whose team leader is played by Ralph Fiennes), they come under fire from a farmhouse off on the heat-blurred horizon.

What ensues is an enervating sniper duel during which Sanborn gets to test his long range shooting abilities -- and patience -- against those of a distant, anonymous antagonist armed with a Dragunov. Sanborn's .50 caliber Barrett eventually proves more than adequate to the task, but the episode provides a great example of terror's combat counterpart: tedium.

If you've been waiting to see or hear about an Iraq war movie that makes the grade as an effective entertainment, your wait is over. To its credit, though, The Hurt Locker never sacrifices political reality or social awareness in order to entertain. When the unit's Hummer drives through the center of town with a cadre of neighborhood kids following in their wake, throwing rocks, we find ourselves pelted with the same ambivalence that the soldiers on this battlefield must feel daily.

As for James and crew: they just ignore them and keep driving.