Eye Candy #119 - "The Hurt Locker"

The Hurt Locker: “War is a drug.” Not a true “war movie”, and less an indictment of the Iraq War than a study of what happens to men who live and work in combat zones and the effects it has on them. Set in Iraq in 2004, the plot follows a three-man bomb disposal unit in the US Army. Bravo Company’s sergeant is killed in an explosion and his replacement, Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner, in an Oscar-nominated role), is a former Army Ranger who has disarmed more than 800 bombs and has a penchant for recklessly putting himself in harm’s way. James and the other two members of the team, Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), find themselves going from bomb site to bomb site, from unexploded car bomb to suspicious pile of rubble to ambushes to people exploding into a fine mist. Where every person is a possible combatant, every cellphone a trigger, every “present” comes with det cord, all as Bravo Company prepares to rotate out. And in between, they try to make sense of their actions, in a world where that may not be possible and face the prospect of a civilian life where they don’t belong. I’ve never seen a movie that was ever this good at communicating heat and temperature. Every shot in this film just radiates heat. I got chapped just watching it. This film is unlike anything that director Kathryn Bigelow has done before. This film is sparse and raw, with location shooting in Jordan that is so much more effective than having Phoenix as a stand-in for Riyadh, as other films have done. It doesn’t judge, it just says this is…what is. And it’s about damn time Renner’s ship came in - I‘ve been expecting good things from him since “SWAT“ and that was 7 fricking years ago. Really, a well-made movie all the way around. Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”