The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow, 2008

Only about 20 seconds of this movie fail. The ending is can't help but burst into some crap nu metal as our anti-hero strides into a dusty sunset, but the rest of the two hours and three minutes are as near perfect as the poster says.

Tense, well written, well acted, well photographed – this director actually uses that horrid hand cam thing that 24 uses to subdue its audience into barfing submission correctly. She combines it with long shots, steady shots, medium shots. Like many other films with the interior of a car being a main set, she is forced to stay on people's faces longer than perhaps is prudent if you are afraid of air born contagions, but there is definitely about 5 minutes of time filmed in a Humvee that must have its door off in order to get the kind of personal space most humans like from one another.

She has reason to do this because she's directing another story from the current Iraq war. A squad of three soldiers are expert bomb detonators, getting called in all over Baghdad to disarm road bombs found in sacks, gravel, children, jackets, cars, you know, the usual.

What gives this movie a kick above things like Jarhead is the character. The characters are stylized from their original men (it's based on Mark Boal's accounts as an embedded reporter) into workable pieces of fiction. So stylized, they actually engage the audience more than Anthony Swofford can being so realistic. Either that or Jake Gyllenhaal sucks.

And when you go with no name actors you either win hard or lose hard. Bigelow approved some pretty amazing actors for the lead trio. When big names pop up (Ralph Fiennes has the sexiest cameo ever and Guy Pearce shows off his ever impressive American accent for three lines) and promptly die.

Fiction wins again with the story structure. While Band of Brothers was its own stranger than fiction jack pot of climaxes for one group of men, Generation Kill has to focus on non-plot related stuff some episodes and Schindler's List sort of war films focus so hard on a single story that they don't really have to use fiction to make a good film. The Hurt Locker combines these. It samples every type of bomb you hear about on the radio and CNN and illustrates it from the no-nonsense points of view of James, Sanborn and Eldridge.

These three make our elite team of “specialists”. They use a special bomb proof suit, robots, pliers, C4, detective skills, determination, some whiskey and a slew of concise insults and compliments to make it through the last 39 days of their tour. The heart weepy story here ties family back home and slaps it against the realities of war in a desert. Which, the audience is asked alongside James, Sanborn and Eldridge, is preferable?

And honestly, it will convince you. One way or the other.