The Hurt Locker

Review By: Ryan Hamelin
RyanHamelin@TheCinemaSource.com

Movie Grade: A

Caution: The following review may be prone to moments of intense hyperbole. This is only because there is no way you can feel anything less than incredibly strong emotions after watching this film.

This movie is everything Jarhead could have been but wasn’t. A story that has a plot, albeit a loosely structured one, characters that are worth audience sympathy instead of entitled it, and intense, gut-wrenching cinematography that brings the Iraq war more in focus than any film before it. It’s not flawless by any means, but it’s certainly a hell of a lot more powerful than Stop-Loss or Home of the Brave. Credit goes out to the brilliant screenwriting and arresting sound design that augment the handheld visuals and pull you in far more than you would ever want to be. This is not a creation designed for the casual moviegoer. This is not disposable entertainment. This may be the closest you ever get to going to war, and my respect for members of the armed forces has been elevated accordingly.

The Hurt Locker follows the last days of a bomb disarming team’s tour of duty in Iraq. The team leader, played by Guy Pierce, has very little screen time before he is replaced by our main character, Sergeant William James, and with the three man team in place, the movie never looks back. Veteran JT Sanborn doesn’t take much of a liking to the reckless new addition, and does his best to rein James in without ever really putting his foot down. He isn’t the leader after all, and the army ranking system puts the guy in the bomb squad suit ahead of the people who give him cover fire. Boy what a tough job it is too. At one point an officer played by David Morse swings by to shake James’s hand and asks him how many bombs he’s disarmed in his life. “873, if you count today” is the nonchalant response. Not many people stare down their own death more than a couple of times in their life, and few do it on purpose. The thing that makes this film work so well is that you can see the honesty in the actor’s eyes as he delivers the line. You believe that he has indeed diffused 873 explosive devices, and done it in a myriad of different ways. It is in that fidelity that the success of this movie lies.

The third member of the team, Owen Eldrige, is a man on the brink of an emotional breakdown. He’s not coping all that well with the stresses of his chosen occupation, and has several intriguing conversations with a shrink towards the beginning of the film. Eldrige is played by Brian Geraghty who has had similar assignments before as a soldier in Jarhead and as a coast guard member in The Guardian. He’s probably the character that would be easiest to dismiss on the surface until you recognize that ...