Movie: The Hurt Locker

It’s taken a very long time to come around to director Kathryn Bigelow’s work. My hate relationship with her started way back in 1989, when my excitement with the idea of a female director creating a hard-edged cop thriller with a female protagonist – “Blue Steel,” with Jamie Lee Curtis in the leading role – quickly devolved into disgust.

I mean, how often do you go to a movie on opening weekend, with an audience full of more than willing participants, only to end up joining in with the imprecations and disdainful jokes being hurled at the screen while the movie unspools? That really happened to me, in a movie theater on New York’s Upper East Side, not usually the setting for raucous yelling at the screen. But “Blue Steel” was so ridiculous, and Bigelow’s female rookie cop was SO stupid, that I and my fellow New Yorkers couldn’t stand to stay quiet.

Cut to twenty years later, and “The Hurt Locker.” In between, Bigelow has made a couple of other movies that I have found groaningly ridiculous, including “Point Break” and “Strange Days,” so heading to a screening of her take on the Iraq War experience felt like a real chore, one of those times when the job of reviewing movies actually feels like real work. That despite the fact that as a female, I really believe that my sex needs to stick together and support the few women (about ten percent) in the world that actually get the chance to direct feature films.

Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie star in "The Hurt Locker."

So imagine my surprise when I found myself completely mesmerized by Bigelow’s film! “The Hurt Locker” is a practically perfect war movie, one that doesn’t try to encompass the whole experience of that controversial conflagration in the Middle East. Instead, Bigelow focuses on an elite Army bomb squad, three men who are charged with the responsibility of defusing bombs all over Baghdad.

Jeremy Renner shines (Oscar, are you listening?) as Staff Sergeant William James, the lead bomb defuser whose reckless style leaves his subordinates (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) scrambling for cover every time they are called out on a mission.

Jeremy Renner gives an Oscar-worthy performance in "The Hurt Locker."

Every moment of Bigelow’s film is fascinating, as the squad moves through the streets trying to stay alive while taking incredible risks. The movie really ramps up when the trio ends up outside of town, pinned down by Iraqi rebels along with some bounty-hunting independent contractors (think Blackwater) led by Ralph Fiennes. That sequence alone is worth the price of admission, but the whole drama is a real eye-opener that takes us deep into the psyche of a soldier whose life depends on the adrenaline rush he gets by facing down death every day, and the best thing Bigelow has ever done.

Rated: R
Stars: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, Evangeline Lilly
Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Studio/Official Site: http://www.thehurtlocker-movie.com/