..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Iraq war movies, like the handful of Vietnam war dramas made during the actual Vietnam war,  suffer from the fact that Bush’s Bamboozle is so unpopular, foisted on us by a dubious sell-job composed in Neo-Con Hell. But the subject -- a dark, hellish war fought far from home in primitive sandy environs surrounded by the super media age, waged by soldiers whose tours of duty are stretched beyond the limit -- is rich with promise. And Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal’s The Hurt Locker mines a lot of it.
     
Bigelow‘s Iraq war thriller, from a  script by ex-embedded journalist Boal, is as good as they say: a war movie with a real sense of deadly expertise, male bonding and conflicts, and constant undercurrents of danger. Like many of the classic post-World War II movies -- the darker ones like Attack!, Men in War, The Big Red One and Platoon, The Hurt Locker immerses us in the everyday details of battle, bloodshed and temporary calm. It shows us how a bomb disposal squad -- a troop/troupe that  includes Jeremy Renner as initially cocky and reckless Staff Sgt. William James, along with Anthony Mackie as the more somber and careful  Sgt. J.T. Sanborn, and Guy Pearce as James’ dashing (and quickly exiting) predecessor Sgt. Matt Thompson, with pungent cameos by Ralph Fiennes and David Morse.

Bigelow, with maximum intensity and concentration shows these men as they walk the war torn streets, scout the terrain, get dressed (in their bulky moon man outfits) and snip the wires, sometimes under fire. There was a famous movie ad tag line for Clouzot’s great nitro-on-the-truck thriller The Wages of Fear -- “You sit there, waiting for the theatre to explode!” -- and it its here too.
     
The movie’s visual logistics are impressive, but so is its devotion to terse hard-packed action and character, in the Mann-Fuller-Aldrich-Boetticher school. And it also has that mystical timeless sense of  desert carnage you get in David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia or, more to the point, in Play Dirty by Andre de Toth -- who directed the train battle in Lawrence.
         
The Hurt Locker succeeds so well because, unlike most of the other Iraq war movies or documentaries, it doesn’t wear its politics on its sleeve, pro or con. Still, as Fuller has so cogently said: every truthful war movie is actually anti-war, something true all the way back to The Iliad. Hurt Locker has prompted a big wave of critical support, mostly well deserved and I‘m glad for Bigelow, whose well-earned spot as America‘s premiere woman action movie director has always seemed over-categorization.
      
But with this movie, she becomes indisputably one of America‘s premier action movie directors, period. And her woman’s touch -- maybe manifested in Locker’s unabashed look at warrior sexiness and the quiet skill with Bigelow strips way macho illusions -- only adds to this movie’s phenomenal power.     

 
-by Michael Wilmington

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