Day 046 || The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker, 2009

Dir. Kathryn Bigelow

"And then you forget the few things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things."

The Hurt Locker is a movie most, if not everyone's, heard of by now. It's getting a lot of hype for being the defining war movie of our generation, and easily the most accurate and successful look at the current conflict in Iraq, or war, if you want to call it that. Those wouldn't be inaccurate statements, but to say it's the film of the year, or perfect would be stretching things.

Kathryn Bigelow, whose work I'm mostly unfamiliar with, has a great visual eye and style, that keeps what could have been a very drab and bleak looking film, viscerally engaging, with the use of camera cuts, pans, and color palettes implemented during key scenes. It's a very competently shot film, complimented by an even stronger cast. Jeremy Renner plays team leader, Will James, who is known as a wild man. He's seemingly careless and reckless in his duties as bomb tech, someone who disarms IEDs on a day-to-day basis. Renner plays the character superbly, not allowing James to become a cliche, which could have easily been the case. If it wasn't for his wonderful performance and the cinematography I'm not quite sure if this film would have received the attention and kudos it did.

Some of the other characters fall into the typical archetypes you would expect, and even the aforementioned James has a few archetypal moments that really feel like the film is just running through all the same old notes we've seen before, but it's never eye-rollingly bad and it never, not once, takes you out of the film. The film works best during the nail-bitingly tense bomb disarming scenes, where you really never know what will happen, and you genuinely fear for the characters. It's when the film shifts focus from these scenes that it becomes a tad unstable, giving way to either brilliance (a scene featuring James pre-military, home-life and a heart to heart with his newborn son), or embarrassment (a macho scene where the squad drinks and fights out their feelings).

On the whole though, The Hurt Locker does so much right, that it's really easy to forgive the few shortcomings which do exist, don't let the hype fool you. Is it film of the year material? Not in this reviewer's opinion, but it's a great film, and one that's easy to recommend to most everyone.

4 out of 5