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Flicks - The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow’s terrific new film The Hurt Locker is about an Army unit of explosive ordinance disposal technicians in 2004 Iraq—or to put it bluntly, guys who defuse roadside bombs. by Chris Dashiell - The Film Snob The Hurt Locker is military slang for a really bad place where you don't want to be. It's also the title of Kathryn Bigelow's terrific new film about an Army unit of explosive ordinance disposal technicians in 2004 Iraq—or to put it bluntly, guys who defuse roadside bombs, obviously one of the most high-risk jobs a soldier could have. The story is by Mark Boal, a reporter who was embedded with such a unit in Iraq and whose screenplay captures the casual insulated talk of soldiers who don't have the leisure to focus on anything but the task at hand.
At the center of the drama is Sergeant Will James, played by Jeremy Renner, a combat engineer who takes command and promptly alienates his two fellow officers with his fearless hot-dog attitude. James is a tight bundle of energy, an explosives expert with a swagger that comes from knowing he's the best at what he does. One of the film's finest sequences shows him trying to figure out how to defuse a car bomb—he keeps going past the point where it's even necessary to keep trying, only because he's genuinely curious about how the thing is rigged, and you can see the professional fascination in his eyes as he keeps digging around in the seats, the dashboard, the engine. That obsessive quality makes him a danger to himself and his men, because the rush he gets from what he does overrides his sense of duty.
It was a shrewd move by Bigelow to cast this unknown, unglamorous actor in the leading role instead of the usual big name star with good looks. We're meant to distrust and be exasperated with James, just like the men under his command, even while we can't help but admire the man's fearlessness. The audience ends up identifying with his partner Sergeant Sanborn (played by the excellent Anthony Mackie) a handsome level-headed black soldier who is rightfully angry at James's risky behavior. The other member, Specialist Eldridge, played by Brian Geraghty, is seeing the company psychiatrist because the impending end of his tour is making his nerves unravel.
The picture has a vivid sense of mortality, dynamic use of hand-held camera, and superior editing craft. Each of the unit's assignments is handled differently, with varying rhythms of tension and suspense, and after a while the film has made you experience what it must feel like to be in the middle of this deadly adrenalin rush, where you could blow up any second, and the Iraqi civilians represent an unknown and possibly dangerous quantity.
A powerful overriding theme is how war can become a very seductive addiction, an existence lived on the edge that threatens to make everything after the war seem dull and pointless by comparison. The Hurt Locker makes us feel viscerally how a man could become hooked on the peak experience of combat, and how all the ordinary joys and sorrows of life can become diminished until there is nothing left of a man but a half-mad warrior.