‘THE Hurt Locker” hurls you into what asymmetric warfare means in Iraq: massive courage on one side, massive cowardice on the other.
Despite its pumped-up admiration for our troops and some scenes that spurt adrenaline like a fire hose, this sort-of-thriller about a bomb squad working in 2004 is stretched both timewise and for plausibility.
Kathryn Bigelow (“Point Break”), one of Hollywood’s few remaining unashamedly manly directors — it’s easy to picture her slugging back whiskeys with John Ford or Howard Hawks, making jokes about gun-control pansies — puts you in the boots of a cocky Ranger sergeant (Jeremy Renner, in a gung-ho performance) who leads his squadmates (Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty) in defusing IEDs, or improvised explosive devices — roadside booby traps.
James (Renner), clad in a protective outfit as bulky as a spacesuit, carefully clips his way through wires as Bigelow stomps on the suspense pedal. In one particularly gulp-inducing shot, he pulls one cord only to discover it’s attached to a spider web of wires, each leading to its own bomb.
The movie, photographed in the shake-the-camera, play-with-the-zoom-lens style that used to say “gritty” but now says “Dunder Mifflin,” is more an anthology than a story.
After three long, tense bomb-defusing scenes that don’t vary much (twice, a soldier lights a cigarette afterward, but the comparison to having sex seems forced — all he’s scored is the right to keep living), Bigelow finds herself starting over, with a long sniper sequence that, while intensely realized, says little. After this, the troops horse around, get wasted and listen to heavy metal. It’s been done.
Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce and David Morse pop up, but each of them only for a few minutes, as if they’re guests on a lethal version of “The Tonight Show.” Each is so poorly integrated into the film that it’s as if the actors happened to be visiting the set when Bigelow ordered them to suit up, and they were afraid to say no.
In the second half, James goes on two hard-to-
believe quests, first busting into the home of a friendly Iraqi to wave a pistol around, then leading a demented freelance mission to find a bomber in the streets at night. Tense? Yes. And filmed with gusto.
“We didn’t have to go out looking for trouble to get your adrenaline fix,” says one soldier. True. That’s why enlisted troops take orders from older officers instead of running around organizing suicide missions with no supervision whatsoever.
THE HURT LOCKER
Feel the pain.
Running time: 130 minutes. Rated R (profanity, graphic violence). At the Lincoln Square and the Sunshine.