The Hurt Locker

Do you have a director whose work drives you crazy? For whom critiques and film buffs seem to fall all over themselves in praise, to your utter amazement?  Steven Spielberg perhaps?  Well, mine is Katherine Bigelow.   I've seen a enough of her films (Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days) to know that she can take a strong idea and visual sense, and pulverize it with overlong action sequences, ridiculous dialogue and cartoon-ish characters.

So the Hurt Locker, her latest movie (and in my own defense, one I chose because it fit into a time slot on the only day of the week I was taking off) surprised me.    It follows a bomb disposal team in current Iraq, on their last 38 days of their tour.    It does have her signature elements, but has a much stronger human element to it.  I cared about these characters - or more so than typical KB characters at any rate.  And so, while I had my eyes cast down for probably 40% of the excruciating bomb disarming sequences, and so can hardly claim I loved it, I did get a real sense of the horror of Iraq, and of modern war.    And the portrayal of James, the adrenalin-junkie veteran of 873 bomb disposals, by Jeremy Renner, is a compelling performance.