Among the dullest filYAWNms evYAWNer

The Hurt Locker is a tepid film. It is inconsistent, incomplete, and often effete. Ultimately I didn’t care about any of the characters and this made me angry.

The solders we will share our time with are assigned to a bomb disposal unit in Iraq; they have about six weeks left in this tour. The film starts with a tragedy. The diffusing expert is killed with the device he tries to diffuse explodes. He was apparently respected and careful, so his death sharpens the edginess the team possessed anyway. This anxiety increases significantly when his replacement arrives. Sgt Will James is a rambunctious show-off intent on adding more and more disarming feats to his already lengthy list. As an example of his dangerous teamlessness, on his first mission, he throws smoke grenades so that the rest of the squad, all standing guard watching for any possible threat, cannot see him. For this James is praised by a war-proud major who seemed to be a lukewarm analogue to the seriously scary Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duval in Apocalypse Now). The major is broad symbol of characters meant to appear only once and who only might further the story.

Sgt JT Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge round out the uncomfortable triumvirate that witnesses, participates and instigates the events of the interminable movie. They leave the part of the city they patrol for an ill-defined “mission” in the desert where they meet up with some ill-defined mercenaries(?) and get caught up in an hours long sniper situation that feels like it lasts for hours. Later, they break what amounts to soldier’s superstition by allowing an unexpected passenger—the camp psychiatrist. He is the polar opposite of the irresponsible major—he is just as flat and just as temporary.

The portion of the film that is supposed to give us a different insight into Sgt James is complex and the only thing I could say I liked, however it was badly timed. James discovers that a little imp he had come to like had been turned into a body-bomb (murdered and stuffed with explosives). He gathers some hasty intelligence and goes in seek of revenge. In the process he puts himself and his “buds” in danger. His real motives, their results, and what James takes away from this are perhaps the only reasons to watch this almost endless, boring film whose foundation is waiting … waiting … waiting … roll credits.

Guy Pearce, Ralph Feinnes, and David Morse (yea I know, where did he come from?) play stock stereotypes. I’m not sure if the script offered them little opportunity to create any depth or if they were just as bored by it as I turned out to be. The principles play types only slightly more rounded (and I must admit to having to resort to imdb.com to find their names): the devil may care thrill seeker (Jeremy Renner), the avuncular sergeant whose goal is to get everyone home alive but lacks any real passion about it (Anthony Mackie) and the semi-shell-shocked kid (Brian Geraghty).

My guiltiest pleasures are car chases and explosions. There were no car chases but some of the explosions were pretty cool but they were not enough to rescue the film from its pervasive lassitude.

Beyond that … the camerawork was dull. The setting was just lots of shades of brown. There was little to no music, this meant ambient sound. We see a group of men, one a sniper, another the second spotter and they wait, wait, wait … wait ……. wait …….. wait with only desert wind for sound. The movie really was that dull.

Calling back to the opening of this review, the boredom was seriously annoying but what made me angry is that I didn’t care at all about any of the characters. None of them were invested with enough of a back story or even a front story that allowed me to hold on to something that would permit me to feel something, anything (as awful as it may sound whether/how they lived or died didn’t affect me at all). And it was hard for me to imagine that I would actually have to try to find something tangible in a soldier (a type of character that usually comes pre-loaded with juicy bits).

This is a film about an ongoing war. So it walks a razor blade. Modern war movies are either anti-war or a sort of pro-war that explains that the motives can be noble even if all the actions are not (thus mature and complex). When you make a film about a current conflict, there is very little wiggle room here because we are still sorting out and struggling with the motives. I think The Hurt Locker was able to create a new space between these binary options: if you bore us enough, we might find your lack of any real social commitment “profound.”

Maybe I should go back and watch The English Patient. It had been the most boring Best Picture winner prior to this one. Maybe I’ll try it again to see if any life-by-proxy was breathed into its sand blown corpse.

Recommended:
No