Producer Paul's Ramblings

Watched The Hurt Locker last night. The one problem of watching a movie on DVD after hearing tons of hype about it is that, try as you might, you go in with expectations. So many people have proclaimed Hurt Locker the best movie of the year that I was ready to see something earth-shattering, something that would rock me to my core with what it had to say about the Iraq War and the men who fought (and are still fighting) in it.

That’s not what I got. Instead, I got a fairly interesting look at a bomb disposal expert (the excellent Jeremy Renner) who likes to live by his own rules and may or may not be borderline psychotic. I was promised an action movie and I got a drama interspersed with occasional action scenes. Director Katheryn Bigelow knows action, and the action scenes are well-done and incredibly tense, but when we weren’t getting that, what we got was fairly bland.  There really isn’t much to the characters. We have Renner, who, as I said, may be crazy, but we never really get into what makes him tick (no pun intended). Then we have Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who is little more than a counterpart to Renner’s insanity, and the last member of the trio, Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) who has his own (somewhat cliched) stress issues to deal with after the loss of the first team leader.

The acting was top-notch and the action (what there was of it) good, but I found the story very disjointed (being mainly just a series of vignettes with little thought to any overarching storyline) and I wanted to know more about the inner life of the main character.  Is it worth seeing? Certainly, if nothing else for the nail-biting tension in the bomb-defusing scenarios. Is it the Best Picture of the year? Not to me.

6/10