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Written by Mark Boal
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Bigelow has made some of my favorite movies. The odd thing is that she mainly directs action flicks, which is pretty unheard of for a chick. While most lady directors stick to typical romantic comedy shit, Bigelow has taken it upon herself to become the go-to director for dramatic action flicks with heart. Point Break, arguably the best action flick of the 90’s, and Near Dark, a flick that did vampire action/drama wayyyy before it was cool, were both directed by Bigelow. It has also been rumored that she played a major part in the production of Terminator 2, without a doubt the best action flick of the 90’s, directed by her then husband James Cameron. That said, The Hurt Locker deserves every accolade and bit of praise it has been getting for the past 7 or 8 months. It is, in my humble opinion, the best movie of 2009. However, it is not without its flaws.
The Hurt Locker follows a bomb removal squad in Iraq for about the final 80 or so days in their tour of duty. The flick starts out with a scene so high in tension that I actually had to pause it just to get my breath back. Anthony Mackie, in an award-worthy performance plays Sergeant Sandborn, second in command to Staff Sergeant Matt Thompson (played by the always magical Guy Pearce), while the young and wonderful Brian Geraghty plays Specialist Owen Eldridge. When their leader dies in combat, Sandborn and Eldridge are saddled with Staff Sergeant Will James (played by Jeremy Renner, that guy you probably keep hearing about but you’ve willfully ignored while he played awesome characters in such movies as Dahmer, North Country, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Crawford, and 28 Days Later). Will James is young, cocky, brash, and kind of reckless. Overall, he’s a bit of a D-Bag. But he’s defused something like 800 bombs and he’s fucking good at what he does. For the next 75 days, James leads Sandborn and Eldridge on the ride of their lives.
What’s good: Damn near everything. As you’ve probably been reading, Jeremy Renner is fucking fantastic. Absolutely incredible. His performanced is nuanced and he acts better than most guys with twice as much experience. What’s most surprising is that he really does change by the end of the movie. He’s completely different from when we first meet him, and his transformation is really incredible. It’s what makes me love film. As I said before, Anthony Mackie was really incredible as well. There wasn’t a really big change in his character, but you could really see the pain that he held inside of him throughout the movie. Brian Geraghty was really good as well, although his character was kind of one note. Also good: the cinematography. If you’ve read any of my reviews, you’ll know that this is a big make or break point for me. Here, it definitely helped the movie. It was beautifully shot. I believe it was filmed on location in Jordan, and it really shows. You can almost feel the heat coming off of the streets and desert. There were a couple really beautiful slow motion shots that I really really enjoyed, and in my opinion they didn’t use them enough. From what I can recall, there was one in the beginning and another in the middle of the movie. A few more would have really helped.
There wasn’t much in the way of music, but it wasn’t really missed. This flick was about building tension, and the lack of music really helped. There were also a handful of cameos in the flick, which, I’m not gonna lie, were both cool and not so cool. Guy Pearce, David Morse, Ralph Fiennes (Team Voldemort!), and Kate from LOST all showed up for a few minutes. The good part was that they’re awesome cameos. The bad part is that none of them were for more than 5 or 10 minutes. Also, I don’t understand why Evangeline Lilly was in this. Yea, I know, she’s beautiful and all, but she’s not much of an actress, and it seemed like her star power really took away from the weight of Jeremy Renner’s character. At least for me, being a huge LOST fan, it was weird seeing Kate in anything other than LOST and it really took me out of the flick for the last ten minutes, which was probably when I should have been most invested in it. I think the role would have been better suited for somebody a little less known and, quite frankly, a little less beautiful. I just hate seeing incredibly attractive people in indie dramas. I know that seems weird, but I think indie dramas like this are better suited for normal looking people. Nothing against Kate.
The last thing I want to say is this movie is intense. Like, it’ll make your stomach ache. “Why?”, you ask? The tension. I can’t really describe it without getting too spoiler-y, but I will say this – one of the bombs they had to disarm was inside the stomach of a dead 12 year old boy. And that wasn’t the bomb that made my girlfriend run screaming from the room. I’m just saying, if you don’t take lightly to tension and extreme violence, this may not be the flick for you. However, I love that shit, so I can confidently say, without a doubt, this was my favorite movie of 2009. If I had to give it something, I’d say 10 out of 10.
