The Hurt Locker

City Paper Grade: A-

by Sam Adams

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Published: Jul 8, 2009

WAR GAMES: Jeremy Renner is a charismatic cowboy of a soldier in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Kathryn Bigelow's ride-along with a Baghdad bomb squad is thrilling, even when it shouldn't be. Embracing, and sometimes subverting, action-movie grammar, The Hurt Locker expertly builds the tension as wires are cut and devices uncovered, sometimes under fire and sometimes in deserted expanses where the only sound is the sizzle of sweat on metal. Named for the suits which protect the soldiers from unexpected blasts, the movie does its best to slip into their skin. The script, by journalist Mark Boal (who also did the reporting that led to In the Valley of Elah), is episodic and observational, essentially a loosely strung series of set pieces, but Bigelow shifts gears so smoothly you hardly notice the bumps. Jeremy Renner is a charismatic cowboy whose attraction to risk makes him better at his job. Anthony Mackie plays his disapproving but grudgingly respectful superior. The movie has stars as well, including Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes, but their appearances are brief: In this environment, not even the A-list is safe. Beginning with the epigraph, "War is a drug," The Hurt Locker puts forth a theory of adrenaline addiction. These are men who live for the high of imminent danger — and, according to the movie's blunt and superfluous coda, can't live without it. The same goes for its director, whose attraction to characters who feed on violence goes back to her vampire noir Near Dark.

The movie is overtly apolitical, but perhaps more than any movie since Apocalypse Now it looks full into the dangerous forces that are unleashed by war, not all of which can be put back in their box when the hostilities are called off. The Hurt Locker teeters just on edge of its characters' exhilaration, sometimes giving in to it uncritically and at others taking a step away. The back-and-forth makes the movie both engaging and problematic, but then charging headfirst into a delicate subject is what it's about. 

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