The Hurt Locker Review

The Hurt Locker follows a three-person U.S. Army unit that defuses improvised explosive devices. Though it’s set in Baghdad, I can’t imagine a more prescient account of what’s going on in Afghanistan as well (just recently the New York Times ran a photo of a huge roadside explosion). Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, from a script by Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker has the potential to make heroes out of the real soldiers that do this unglamorous but (evidently) essential work.

Because the work itself rarely engages broader feuds and politics in Baghdad, and focuses on the pressing problem of weapons that indiscriminately kill, the unit (convincingly played by Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) has a quasi-humanitarian role though they think of themselves as warriors. The dialogue contains at least a couple of glib references to how reflexive their role is in this conflict and that their presence is the cause of the insurgency to which they’re reacting.

The Hurt Locker is not necessarily a political film it’s clear however that the technical structure, which is less of a sequence of events than a collection of incongruent situations held together by shared characters, draws on the unusual mission of these soldiers. There’s no clear mid-point in the film, and it ends by way of deus ex machina (the tour of duty ends).

Thus the task we’re following as an audience can be immensely frustrating - Sisyphus-like - in a context that is at best a communications and reconnaissance nightmare, and at worst a human tragedy that lurches forward, with no purpose, by its own momentum. The convoluted ethics of decision-making are underscored by lots of jumpy editing (by Bob Murawski and Chris Innis).

At times The Hurt Locker does sort-of resemble a regular action film, but - remarkably - there’s less explicit violence here, and undoubtedly far more substance.

- Adam Collier