a SIFF 2009 review
Bigelow’s Locker a Powder Keg of Tension
With just over a month left in their tour of duty, bomb disposal techs Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) aren’t too sure of their new Staff Sergeant William James’ (Jeremy Renner) sanity. He’s pushing them well beyond the breaking point, their daily stride through the streets of Baghdad looking for explosive devices already dangerous enough without him being such an out of control wild card.
Jeremy Renner in Summit Entertainments' The Hurt Locker
Kathryn Bigelow’s (Point Break, The Weight of Water) new motion picture The Hurt Locker is everything you’ve heard and more. Fueled with adrenaline, powered by an almost volcanic sense of pace, the raw visceral power of this intense thriller is a powder keg of raw fury and sweat-stained terror. From the opening moments the tension the director is able to achieve contorts the audience into every-tightening knots of fear and apprehension, every nook, every cranny, every piece of the landscape a potential disaster just waiting to engulf our protagonists.
If that was just all this movie was that would be more than enough to warrant a recommendation, but Bigelow’s epic is all that and so much more. Journalist Mark Boal’s (his story was the basis for In the Valley of Elah) deft, complex and multilayered screenplay is an emotional journey inside the heads of three men driving headlong into a Conradian heart of darkness. Their relationship, its ups and down, ins and outs, are what make this film an almost instant classic, their journey of survival and camaraderie the tip of the sword giving the picture its edge.
The question now is not whether or not audiences will respond to The Hurt Locker but whether or not they’ll step out of their door to even see it. Films even minutely associated with the Iraq War have met with nothing but box office disaster, and while the quality has been fairly high across the board the level of viewer indifference has more than exceeded it.
Here’s hoping that trend does not continue here. Not so much an examinations of the whys of the war, Bigelow and Boal are more interested in the men tasked for fighting than they are anything else. Together, they have achieved a visceral spectacle that left me breathless, the final days of their tour clicking down like its own sort of time bomb eager to explode.
Renner has never been better. While he’s given solid supporting turns in films as diverse as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 28 Weeks Later and North Country, his complex turn here is downright mesmerizing. Sanborn is a man alive in the desert and addicted to the juice of combat. Danger excites him, and like a drug addict in search of a fix each roadside device is a needle to the vein propelling him onward.
Mackey and relative newcomer Geraghty are the yin to Renner’s yang. They do their job without questions or hesitation but they also look forward to the peaceful tranquility of home. This life, while one of their own choosing, isn’t what they want to be associated with forever, each actor reflecting these conflicting and sometimes painful emotions with believable accuracy.
Bigger name actors like Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes and David Morse make brief appearance, but it is the main trio that does all the hard work here. Bigelow tracks them through Boal’s incendiary maze with confident skill, no edit or shot a false or unwelcome one. Everything works in direct relation to its counterpart; no pieces of the puzzle left unconnected the filmmaker delivering her most assured and confident work since her underappreciated 1995 triumph Strange Days.
I saw The Hurt Locker twice during the Seattle International Films Festival and I can’t wait to see it a third time when it hits theaters here in Seattle later in July. Like all great cinema each viewing reveals something new I didn’t see beforehand, the pleasures of the picture wrapped up in nitroglycerin covered celluloid that offers a major bang. This is the real-deal in action theatrics, Bigelow delivering a pulse-pounding dynamo that puts all of Hollywood’s meager Summer 2009 offerings to shame.
Film Rating: êêêê (out of 4)
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