The Hurt Locker

Amer­i­can adven­tur­ism in the Mid­dle East has inspired plen­ty of cin­e­ma over the last decade, but Kathryn Bigelow’s first fea­ture since K‑19: The Wid­ow­mak­er is much clos­er in style and tone to the war por­trayed in Gen­er­a­tion Kill than that of Jar­head or The Kingdom.

In part, this may be due to its source mate­r­i­al – the film hav­ing orig­i­nat­ed from the pen of an embed­ded reporter, the screen­writer and some-time jour­nal­ist Mark Boal. As such, the script main­tains a sub­jec­tiv­i­ty that offers lit­tle in the way of con­text or back­ground to the action.

Instead, the film focus­es its atten­tion upon the occu­pants of The Hurt Lock­er, a three man bomb dis­pos­al team con­sist­ing of Sergeant San­born (Antho­ny Mack­ie) and Spe­cial­ist Eldridge (Bri­an Ger­aghty) – both of whom are in the final, ago­nis­ing weeks of a year-long deploy­ment in Iraq – and new mem­ber Staff Sergeant James (Jere­my Ren­ner), who has joined the out­fit fol­low­ing the unfor­tu­nate oblit­er­a­tion of his predecessor.

James doesn’t sit well with the oth­er men; their ambi­tion to get home in one piece at the end of the tour coun­tered by his reck­less­ness. He is a wild man who sets out his stall by dis­miss­ing the use of a remote con­trolled robot in favour of don­ning the cum­ber­some bomb suit that allows him to get up close and per­son­al with the IEDs and unex­plod­ed ordi­nance that pep­per the muti­lat­ed land­scape of Baghdad.

The rela­tion­ship between these men pro­vides the dri­ving force of the nar­ra­tive. Oth­er troops are shown fleet­ing­ly, and offi­cers appear only occa­sion­al­ly; their mud­dled attempts to inspire the men under their com­mand light years from the jin­go­is­tic lead­er­ship of Robert Duvall’s cav­al­ry offi­cer in Apoc­a­lypse Now.

Even the ene­my are dis­creet, cast not as fanat­ics but civil­ians resist­ing an occu­py­ing force, try­ing to remain unseen, their iden­ti­ties uncer­tain. A sequence in which a poten­tial insur­gent trades a glance with James, hav­ing sud­den­ly become a non-com­bat­ant by drop­ping the phone with which he had intend­ed to trig­ger the now-defused bomb out­side of his build­ing, is indica­tive of the film’s complexity.

The action itself is episod­ic, with every ounce of ten­sion eked from some stun­ning set pieces where lin­ger­ing shots accen­tu­ate the bleak cin­e­matog­ra­phy and stripped down sound design to draw the max­i­mum heat and hope­less­ness of this hell on earth.

The cen­tral per­for­mances strength­en as the film devel­ops. Jere­my Ren­ner is the stand­out, though the sup­port­ing cast are well deployed – a scene involv­ing an inept team of British ​‘con­trac­tors’ offer­ing a wry com­ment about both the futil­i­ty of mod­ern com­bat and the polit­i­cal cir­cus which has led a super­pow­er to deploy mer­ce­nar­ies to do its dirty work amongst the lame cats and skin­ny kids of a war zone.