The Hurt Locker: MSN Review

Vampire thriller Near Dark was a highly ingenious spin on horror lore, while 1989’s Blue Steel put rookie cop Jamie Lee Curtis in the firing line in more ways than one. Point Break, meanwhile, more than lived up to its tagline – “100% Pure Adrenaline” – with a crazy array of set-pieces that made it easily the finest surfing bank-robber movie ever made.

 

Unto The Breech: The Best War Movies

The Coolest Movie Characters Ever!

Follow MSN Movies on Twitter

 

But then things started to go awry. The futuristic Strange Days was a vapid, confusing mess; The Weight of Water sank like a lead balloon; and submarine drama K-19: The Widowmaker was scuppered from the off by its dreadful title and Harrison Ford’s daft Russian accent. Suddenly Jim Cameron’s ex couldn’t get arrested in Hollywood and this her comeback venture was turned down by every studio.

 

The fact she managed to get it made is a reason to celebrate. Not only because The Hurt Locker is a terrific movie that puts the audience side by side with the courageous bomb disposal experts trying to rid Baghdad of the IEDs (improvised explosive devices) that litter its battle-ravaged streets. It’s also because it restores Bigelow to her rightful place as one of the best directors around, regardless of gender or genre.

 

Set in the summer of 2004, The Hurt Locker starts as it means to go on with an almost unbearably tense interface between three members of the Army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal team and a roadside bomb. The mission does not go well, creating a vacancy that is soon filled by Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). A reckless rule-breaker with a cavalier disregard for military procedure, his conduct quickly puts him on a collision course with his colleagues, level-headed sergeant J T Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and fearful young specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). Can it be long, they wonder, before he blows them all to kingdom come?

 

Unfolding in an episodic fashion that reflects the daily grind of this most dangerous of occupations – observed at first hand by scriptwriter Mark Boal, a journalist who spent several weeks embedded with an Army bomb squad in Baghdad five years ago – The Hurt Locker sees James, Sanborn and Eldridge encounter a variety of challenges. One bomb is housed in a car outside an embassy; another is strapped around the waist of a terrified Iraqi civilian. Then there’s the explosive housed inside the corpse of a young boy, a shocking discovery that sends James off on a personal mission of revenge.

 

Boal’s point is that war itself is a drug that gives the likes of Renner’s character a hit they can’t find back in ordinary life. What Bigelow does, however, is allow us to feel that vicarious thrill for ourselves by placing us inside the action like no film before it. Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce supply eye-catching cameos, though the focus is quite rightly on her three protagonists as they race against time to defuse fiendish devices in the most uncomfortable conditions imaginable. At no point, meanwhile, does Bigelow try to justify the conflict they find themselves in. Theirs is a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

A pulse-pounding journey into the theatre of war, made by a filmmaker who knows action cinema backwards.

 

Follow MSN Movies on Twitter

The Coolest Movie Characters Ever!

Unto The Breech: The Best War Movies