Armed & Dangerous

THE HURT LOCKER will kick you in the stomach.

I’ve been trying to come up with a more nuanced way to put it, but I
can’t, really: You will feel fine going in to The Hurt Locker.
You will walk out feeling like you lost a fistfight.

It’s easy to say The Hurt Locker is gonna be one of the best
movies of this year, because… well, it is. But that doesn’t
convey what a brutal, intense, challenging experience it is to watch
Kathryn Bigelow’s film. Bigelow has been one of Hollywood’s more
reliable action directors for two decades, with solid, entertaining
films that rarely snagged critical raves: Point Break, Blue
Steel, Strange Days, K-19: The Widowmaker. Yet The
Hurt Locker is the sort of movie that critics eagerly slobber over
with phrases like “a tour de force” (that’d be the New York
Times‘ A.O. Scott) and “a near-perfect movie” (nice, Richard
Corliss of Time). With The Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s getting
accolades that simply aren’t offered when one makes a film about Keanu
going undercover to bust Swayze’s gang of bank robbing surfers.

But it’s not just the fact that The Hurt Locker is set in
Baghdad in 2004 that’s letting critics finally admit Bigelow’s really
fucking good at what she does—there’s also the fact that here,
Bigelow’s better than she’s ever been. It’s not any director that can
make you tense every muscle in your body the moment a film begins, and
fewer still can make it so you don’t relax until you walk out of the
theater.

Practically unknown before The Hurt Locker, the excellent
Jeremy Renner takes the film’s lead as William James, a staff sergeant
in charge of Bravo Company, a bomb squad in Iraq. The Hurt
Locker follows Bravo Company’s tour of duty—a title card
counts down the days remaining in their tour—and what they do
never changes: People see wires leading somewhere. People see parked
cars with sagging suspensions. People see piles of garbage. Bravo
Company comes in, finds the bomb, and tries to diffuse it. Sometimes
they succeed, and everyone lives; sometimes they don’t, and everyone
doesn’t.

For these soldiers, this is a place that’s alien and lethal, and the
stakes are higher for Bravo than for anyone else. “Pretty much the
bottom line is if you’re in Iraq, you’re dead,” says Specialist Owen
Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), so it means something when we discover that
Staff Sergeant James—apparently dissatisfied with the already
shortened life expectancy of a soldier—seeks out even more
danger. James is described as “rowdy,” “reckless,” and a “wild man,”
but mostly, he’s just a junkie. “Let’s rock ‘n’ roll, man,” he blithely
says at the outset of one mission, causing his second-in-command,
Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), no shortage of concern.
Afterward, James lights a cigarette, taking a post-coital drag. “That
was good,” he sighs appreciatively, and it’s hardly a revelation when
we learn he keeps bits of his favorite bombs under his bunk, with a
story that accompanies each perverse souvenir. As Sanborn tries to
figure out how to work alongside a man like James, Eldridge threatens
to go nuts himself with the strain. Throughout, screenwriter Mark
Boal—who wrote the script after being embedded with a bomb squad
in Iraq—isn’t concerned with why these men are in Baghdad, nor
whether or not they should be. Ten minutes into The Hurt Locker,
you’ll be pressed to care, too—you’ll just be overwhelmed with
the reality that they are there, and this is what it’s
like, and fuck, it is horrifying and exhilarating.

The “exhilarating” thing is a huge part of what makes The Hurt
Locker so astounding: War films are usually easy to group into
their “pro-war” and “anti-war” subgenres; likewise, thrillers, action
flicks, and dramas typically adhere to their stock morals and cinematic
tricks. The Hurt Locker plays on all of those audience
expectations, making you wince and stare wide-eyed in the same shot,
injecting you with a rush of adrenalin before stepping back to let the
aftertaste of guilt rise in your throat. Regardless of your feelings on
Iraq, The Hurt Locker will dump you there, in all of its
sun-bleached, grueling fucked-up-ness, and by the time it’s over,
Bigelow’s made you understand why a man would willingly go there to
blow things up. For all The Hurt Locker‘s stunning action
sequences, sharp characters, and hyper-detailed visuals, it’s that
terrifying sensation that’ll stick with you when you walk out of the
theater, weary and reeling.