You'll Have to Remind Yourself to Breathe

The Hurt Locker
Dir: Kathryn Bigelow, 2009
Score on Metacritic: 94. Rank (all-time highest scoring): 12


Movie-making shock and awe.

Members of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team (read: Army bomb squad), with a little over a month left in their tour, fight their own demons, work together and are constantly vigilant in hopes of making it out of Iraq alive. Tensions run high when adrenaline addict SFC William James (Jeremy Renner) becomes their leader. James dauntlessly does it his way, taking risks his team sees as unnecessary, with what first seems like little regard for his own life or the lives of his teammates — Sgt. JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Gerghty) — who live in an even more heightened state of fear than before. Another side of James is revealed when he befriends a soccer-playing, urban slang-slinging Iraqi boy who sells DVDs.

The Hurt Locker is a great film. It crackles with intensity and suspense from the very beginning and keeps the pressure on throughout. Sometimes I held my breath and only realized I'd been doing it when a scene ended and I exhaled. (If you smoke, you're gonna need a cigarette at least a dozen times.) Knuckle-biting, emotionally draining scenes are juxtaposed nicely with ones of the soldiers at rest (albeit not really relaxed), which is a great technique for creating an atmosphere where it's never possible to be completely at ease or removed from the war.

There isn't a lot of room in between disposals, detonations, gunfire and other hazards to plumb the depths of each character, which is why I have to bow down to Bigelow and writer Mark Boal for fleshing out the characters as much as they do. There is always a sense that the soldiers are more than the sum of their parts and even though we don't know them in any other context, we instantly want them to survive and get a chance at life outside of war.

Jeremy Renner also deserves major props (maybe even an Oscar, though I'm not getting my hopes up that the Academy will choose someone other than Jeff Bridges) because he is fantastic. He turns a character that another actor might have made into a one-dimensional, cocky, reckless sonuvabitch into the best kind of badass: a complex, interesting — and sexy, very sexy — one that you want to see more of. Regardless of what James is doing (and how idiotic it sometimes is) he's always compelling. I loved watching him in every shot, from the first frame he occupies to the last.

I'm not a war movie buff and I really liked this movie, which means I have no qualms wholeheartedly recommending it. It packs less grossness and carnage than an episode of your favorite medical drama and the cinematography isn't as shaky cam dependent as I expected (ergo: don't worry if you can't take too much of oozing fluids and severed limbs, or if you, like me, get nauseous when watching jittery images). It's still playing in a few theaters, I think, but it's definitely available in all the home viewing formats.