Movie-going audiences haven’t seen much from director Kathryn Bigelow since 2003’s box office flop K9: The Widowmaker, when Harrison Ford unhappily took home the statue for “worst accent in the history of film” (previously held by Keanu Reeves for his “British” accent in Dracula). The Hurt Locker, set to be released next month in New York and Los Angeles, should change all that.
Over the past few years studios have shied away from greenlighting any film that even touches on the Iraq War and for good reason - they’ve all been financial disasters. Curiously, they’ve also not actually been about the war. Case in point: Grace is Gone, starring John Cusack as a father struggling to tell his daughter about the death of her mother in Iraq. Picked up at Sundance in 2007 by the Weinstein Co. for four million dollars, it failed to break the million dollar mark worldwide. Home of the Brave, another Iraq-vet flick this time starring Jessica Biel (how realistic!) and Samuel L. Jackson only brought in half of that. In the Valley of Elah, Paul Haggis’ much ballyhoed follow-up to Crash (my pick for the least-deserving Best Picture Winner in Academy history) failed to recoup even one-third of its costs. A pattern starts to emerge. Nothing quite spells ‘immediate cash black hole’ to studios these days than an Iraq War Movie. But these films failed because they were inherently political. They either argued against stop-loss, George Bush, or the war itself. Americans get enough of that at home. They wake up to that. When people go to the movies they’re not looking for a rant from Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann (or at least I hope not).
The Hurt Locker, which recieved a ten minute standing ovation in Venice, follows a three person Explosive Ordnance disposal unit (EOD for short), and brings along no political baggage. This is a film about soldiers who have one of the worst jobs on earth – they diffuse IEDs. Filmed in Jordan, often just miles from the Iraqi border, The Hurt Locker is grab-the-person-next-you intense. There are scenes so nail-bitingly taut and immersive that you’re almost compelled to turn and run out of the theater (kind of like the guy stumbling on screen in full body armor, screaming at everyone to move out of the blast radius). Bigelow employs a shaky, docu-drama approach to directing (Hollywood’s latest crutch to mask small budgets and poor acting) which fits here perfectly. You end up feeling akin to an embedded journalist. Bigelow intelligently chooses relative unknowns for the main characters (though Ray Fiennes and Guy Pearce make quick appearances) and they’re uniformly excellent. Jeremy Renner, who plays James, an aplomb, replacement staff sergeant, is the standout of the film. As a bomb technician, he works an impossible job, and unfortunately he’s very good at what he does (in one particularly harrowing scene he’s forced pull an IED out of the gut of a dead child). In a notable sequence, as James is set to defuse a roadside bomb, a car rolls up on his position. He puts down his gear and pulls his side arm, shouting at the driver while motioning for him to turn around. The man doesn’t understand English, and James doesn’t understand Farsi (a common thread throughout the film), so James shoots out the front window (after having stuck the gun to the driver’s temple). The car backs up and US troops pull him from his car. James laughs, saying something along the lines of “Well, if he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure is now.” It’s a sad, hopeless scene, and Renner pulls it off brilliantly.
The Hurt Locker is the best war film I’ve seen in years and easily outshines the handful of Iraq movies Hollywood's put out. The film is both helpless and heroic; a testament to the immersive and visceral power of film.
