The Hurt Locker [DVD]

Its very hard to disagree with a lot of the comment made in some of the less than complimentary reviews. The characters arent particularly likeable, the plot doesnt move on particularly well. However the film is a series of brilliant set piece scenes, each one had me gripped, each one brilliantly put together. Their brilliance alone save the film and make it very watchable

Professional critics seem to have been falling over themselves to enthuse about Hurt Locker but you have to ask, why?
Is it because Americans are desperately trying to salvage something from their illegal invasion of Iraq (or should I say Eye-Rack)and want to present their troops as heroes? Or is it because the political correctness thought police have decreed that a female director should win an Oscar for Best Film?

Whatever the reason the film is turgid in the extreme and has no real storyline, being instead a series of loosely connected scenes involving bomb disposal people (who in real life are unquestionably very brave). So you sit their waiting for something interesting to develop and eventually the film ends and you think 'was that it?'. Just to confuse matters there is an interlude in the disposing of bombs where they go for a trip into the desert and stumble on a group of (what seems to be) British Special Forces lead by Ralph Fiennes (what WAS he thinking?) who are all frightfully posh and who stand up in the open and allow themselves to be picked off by Iraqi snipers. As if. Do the producers of the film have knowledge of the SAS behaving in this stupid way? Of course our friends from the bomb disposal team save the day.

So in short this is an American war propaganda film with a spot of anti-British sentiment thrown in. Nicely made and well-acted I daresay but there is no story, no plot, no suspense, no surprise. It starts, it ends, and who cares about the characters?

Set in modern Baghdad, The Hurt Locker follows the lives of three of the US Army's bomb disposal technicians as they battle insurgents and their own nerves to stay alive in the world's most dangerous war zone.

The Hurt Locker was directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Blue Steel, Point Break) and was released in 2008 to much fanfare and critical acclaim. It was nominated for nine Oscars and eventually won six (trumping such luminaries as Cameron, Tarantino and Jackson) but it's hard, now, to see what the fuss was about. It is a fairly conventional war movie - typical Hollywood fare in fact - and I can see nothing (well, almost nothing) about it that lifts it above the herd and it is certainly not the equal of, for instance, Saving Private Ryan, Das Boot or Platoon.

Yes, it's well shot and composed, effectively conveying the dusty, sweaty, grimy life of a soldier in front-line Iraq. To be sure, there are some award winning individual shots (the slo-mo explosion sequence where the dust jumps off the roof of a car is particularly tasty) but the ensemble is barely above the ordinary - Three Kings did it just as well.

It's well acted. Jeremy Renner does a fine job as the maverick bomb disposal tech (you may be able to guess where I'm going to go with this), Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty convince as his strung-out support crew and there are some surprising (and brief) cameos from Ralph Fiennes, David Morse and Guy Pearce. But, again, the acting is merely convincing: steely eyes, square jaws, head-in-hands-despair... all that sort of thing.

The story, I'm afraid, is what lets the film down. The word "maverick" really should be banned from use in Hollywood these days (Tom Cruise and Tony Scott have so much to answer for). It really does a profound disservice to the exeptional bravery and professionalism of bomb disposal technicians of all nationalities to see the lead character yank a cluster of IED's from the ground by their detonating cords, opening the boot of an explosive-laden car by means of a hefty kick or letting off a smoke grenade as he approaches the danger zone "to create a diversion". There are plenty of other military mess-ups; some of these are clearly excusable cinematographic necessities (soldiers standing around in tight groups, M113 armoured personnel carriers instead of Bradleys and so-on). However, plenty of others are inexcusably sloppy, betray the absence of a decent (or any) military advisor and seem simply to have been included for the purposes of sensationalism. I was particularly offended when the three main characters rushed off alone and on foot into the hostile night-time Baghdad suburbs to track down a bomber... and then split up because "we can cover more ground that way" for heavens' sake! If the US Army really operate like this (and I cannot convince myself that they do) there is hardly any surprise that the war has lasted so long, costed so much and achieved so little as it has.

In the end, this is a deeply ordinary war movie and it is prone to many of the usual war movie cliches; tensions between the maverick and his by-the-book colleague ultimately resolved, friendship with with the local street urchin, the race against time, shall I cut the red wire or the blue wire? just can't adjust to life on back in the world, oh the horror! oh the humanity! think of the children!

Without the hype that it received it would have made a perfectly acceptable war movie and I would happily have given it three stars. Because of the hype, my sensibilities are offended and I can only give it two.

If you really want to know what it is like to be an EOD officer in Iraq, there are plenty of decent memoirs - Eight Lives Down being a great place to start.