The Hurt Locker is not about Iraq, why we went there, what we did when we got there, or whether we should have gone in the first place. It is not about American foreign policy or domestic disagreement over that policy; it’s not even about soldiers or their qualities or character …  it’s not about politics at all.

The Hurt Locker is about an adrenaline junkie who gets off defusing bombs.

Sgt. Will James is very good at this narrow work. He is occasionally a fool who takes unnecessary chances. Far more often he is an expert who enjoys that his wisely bold tactics occasionally make him appear a fool—because a fool’s luck has nothing to do with his success. Early in the picture and after much prodding, Sgt. James admits to a superior officer that he has defused “873 bombs, counting today.”

Nobody’s luck is that good.

This is a telling scene for another reason: He’s happy for the recognition, but painfully shy about it, too. He fairly leaps from the truck to reply to the officer—but it’s because his inquisitor is an officer, not because the question will give him a moment of glory. The officer, played by the always interesting David Morse, has to pry the information out of him and turn it into a boast on Sgt. James’ behalf. Morse’s officer is so unabashedly enthusiastic with his praise that we’re not sure—and apparently neither is Sgt. James—if it is genuine, or a set-up to a dressing-down for the apparently insane risks he’s just taken.

The little-known (for now), Jeremy Renner plays Sgt. James, and he plays him like a guy who would enjoy solving a Rubik’s Cube while sitting on a high-wire over a pit of rabid alligators. Renner’s James is incapable of simply existing. Every moment must be a deadline or the run-up to some test. In his off-hours he plays punch-out with another soldier, and not just for the sake of taking a punch. The two are working through a grudge right out in the open. He creates a brief mission for himself that can have no benefits in its outcome aside from having survived on the quality of its execution. He looks for reasons to get next to live bombs, once on the pretext of rescuing a pair of entirely disposable gloves. Yet even this has more danger attached to it than anyone first thinks, but Sgt. James knows (at least, I think he does), and gets off on the errand all the more because of it.

The Hurt Locker is also a good-looking picture. For instance, the shots of explosions are carried out much more thoughtfully than with the standard “cover it with cameras” action-picture approach. Director Kathryn Bigelow (whose last great pictures were 20 years ago—Blue Steel and Point Break) shoots the gravelly ground rising in slow motion; she gets the shuddering and the debris exactly right (again, as someone like me who hasn’t seen this stuff for real will imagine they should look)—there is never an obvious, go-for-broke FX shot for its own sake here. At times our view of the explosions is mostly one-off detail, and rather than distracting us from the moment, it enhances how we perceive it. That is the purpose of good direction and good camera work: not to draw attention to itself, but to enhance the story.

Which is a little ironic, because The Hurt Locker is not a story at all, but a character study. It is rare that a character study is carried out with so much expert attention to making a truly engaging and entertaining picture. The Hurt Locker is an apolitical and very entertaining movie about a very interesting man.

Produced and scripted by Mark Boal (who embedded with a U.S. Army bomb squad operating in Baghdad), the year is 2004 and Iraq is a country under siege, thanks mainly to determined insurgents and roadside IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that seem to be everywhere and frequently come with nearby triggermen lying in wait for the opportunity to do the most amount of damage, preferably to American servicemen and women.  Charged with the dangerous and technically complicated job of defusing these bombs is a three-man EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) team led by Staff Sergeant James (an excellent Jeremy Renner) and his squad mates Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty).

The opening scene’s a wowser, and the 40 minutes that follow do their job in setting up characters, their relationships and at least giving off the appearance that we’re headed towards something bigger involving Beckham, a young Iraqi boy who sells DVDs on the base. When this storyline strangely pans out to be much ado about nothing, the plot slowly deflates into a series well-staged but interchangeable episodes with no over-arching story. You’re about an hour in when you start to feel the 130 minute runtime.

Every time “Locker” starts to weave any kind of spell something unnecessarily political comes along to break it. Mostly the sucker punches come at the end of a scene as if to say, “That will teach you for buying into it.”  A tense sequence involving an Iraqi cabdriver who runs a roadblock ends with our troopers roughly handcuffing him. This superfluous drama appears to have been filmed only to allow James to give this Leftist belief an airing, “If he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure the hell is now.”

And that’s just the beginning.

Most troubling is a frighteningly unstable, near-psychotic field commander, Colonel Reed (David Morse), who orders his men to let a wounded Iraqi civilian/suspect bleed out to death even after he’s informed the man could easily be saved with a simple radio call. After watching James work, Reed approaches him with crazy eyes gushing over what a “wild man” he is. Not only is this a monstrous depiction of an American Colonel, it’s faulty storytelling. Morse is a recognizable actor and the disturbing impression his character makes is so strong you keep expecting him to return – maybe even as the film’s antagonist.

Reed isn’t the only officer to take a hit. Christian Camargo plays the utterly clueless Colonel Cambridge, a therapist assigned to help Eldridge deal with battlefield trauma. He chirps cheerily, “Going to war is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It could be fun.”

The worst, however, comes near the end. In a moment of tender humanity James risks his life to treat the body of a dead Iraqi — who may or may not be someone he knows — with respect and care. But again, we’re not allowed a pure moment presenting our troops as they are. Instead we cut to Sanford and Eldridge – two characters we’ve come to admire – only to hear this coldly matter-of-fact exchange regarding the dead Iraqi: You think that’s the “little base rat?” “I don’t know man, they all look the same.”

Not one of these moments, and there are a handful of others, is in anyway necessary to the plot or the understanding of these characters. In a movie that’s already twenty-minutes too long, what motivated Bigelow to hang on to them in a film eager to be touted as being “above politics” is beyond me.

In a throwback to Hollywood’s stereotyped depiction of unstable Vietnam vets, the Iraq War has turned our protagonist, James, into an increasingly reckless adrenaline junkie whose disregard for safety and communication protocol puts everyone around him in danger. After defusing  873 of these things, James is certainly comfortable getting off cowboying around any kind of explosives he might come across (and enjoying a cigarette afterwards),  but he’s also a victim of this war, for he’s no longer in control of his own destiny. The film opens on the words “War is a drug,” and that drug is all James desires. So warped by war, even when looking into his infant son’s eyes, James can say out loud that there’s only one thing he loves … and it’s not the boy.

As the plot plods on James becomes increasingly reckless, eventually leading Eldridge and Sanborn on a night-time hunt for a single suspect through a dangerous urban neighborhood with about a million hiding places. James is beyond audacious now, he’s foolhardy and dangerous and this thoughtless venture results in the near-kidnapping of one of his own men who ends up severely wounded – and this wounded man speaks for all of us when he says, “We didn’t have to go out looking for trouble to get you your adrenaline fix, YOU FUCK!”

But because James has no character arc, he learns nothing from this tragic outing. He’s a slave to this drug … to war, an unprofessional loose cannon who can’t love his son, can’t function in the real world and is on a trajectory to either kill himself, or worse, someone else.  Like any junkie, he’s capable of humanity and leadership, he’s no coward and he knows his job, but he’s a victim to this thing and when we leave him we know it can’t end pretty.

It’s too bad the Iraqi people aren’t a protected class among Leftists. Of course, Leftists spent years lobbying in every imaginable way to abandon 25 million of them to death squads and terrorists, so why should it come as a surprise that Michael Bay’s satire of rap culture earns some outrage but “Hurt Locker” gets a pass.

The women are portrayed as either cannon fodder or screaming like savages, and other than a short, strange encounter with a man who wonders if James is CIA, the men are alternately terrorists, a menacing presence, victims, the butt of jokes or utterly clueless. The only Iraqi with a hint of personality is Beckam, but he’s never given a dimension beyond that of a hustler poisoned by our crass American consumer culture, “Wassup, my nigga…?  Want the cool shit?  I hook you up. Donkeykong? Gay sex…? Gangsta. Hey, man, fuck you!”

No, I’ve never been in the military, but when a film’s over I surely know what my opinion of the characters just portrayed up on that screen is, and I’ve seen this movie twice now trying to reconcile how everything listed above can add up to most every review labeling “The Hurt Locker” as “apolitical.”

Has Hollywood so worn us out that we’ve dumbed “apolitical” down to the point where this portrayal of our Iraqi allies, our troops and the officers who lead them qualifies? I’m not looking for John Wayne and I get battlefield cynicism. “Blackhawk Down” and “Brothers at War” do just fine by me. But when the men in the ranks display cold, casual racism, an American Colonel savagely orders that an Iraqi be left to bleed to death and a profoundly unprofessional protagonist, so demented by war he can no longer love his own son, repeatedly endangers himself and the men in his charge, I don’t see “nuance” or “depth” or “complicated” characters. What I see is politics of the worst kind.

Updated.

Epigraph: a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme.

Epigraphs crop up occasionally in literature and film, but more frequently on the SAT exam.  In fact, I am using the definition of epigraph as the epigraph for this review.  If you are to the right of Bill Clinton, all you need to know about “The Hurt Locker” is its epigraph: “War is a drug.”

Incredibly, the mainstream media is trying to position “The Hurt Locker” as politically neutral.  The mainstream media are dense. “War is a drug.” Drugs are bad.  Thus, war is bad.  This is a left-wing film.  End of story.  Witness the first five seconds of the movie and read the epigraph; if you still have the audacity to trumpet its neutrality, you should be committed to an insane asylum or the newsroom at MSNBC. 

From Director Katherine Bigelow (Point Break) and Screenwriter Mark Boal (whose previous credit is “In the Valley of Ellah”), “The Hurt Locker” is an artificially suspenseful and episodic Iraq War film about an elite Army bomb squad led by Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty).  I say artificially suspenseful because all the tension is developed over the course of each scene with a manipulative soundtrack.  Unfortunately, the tension isn’t sustained from one scene to the next. There is no plot.  Just a series of unrelated missions.  Much like my high school dates, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this thing wasn’t going anywhere.

The characters are color-by-number.  James is the cowboy.  He’s willing to be reckless, abandon protocol, and bone-headedly puts himself and his men in harms way time and time again.  If war is a drug, this guy is Ozzy Osbourne. Sanborn is the dude who plays by the books, has a business mentality, and is always the one who says, “I don’t know, maybe this isn’t such a good idea…..” If you’ve seen “NYPD Blue Shield Law” and “NCIS Cold Case Order” you’ve seen these same characters again and again.

John Nolte was my man-date to the screening (our rapport is budding into an epic bromance; we are in line to co-star as “Dumb, Lazy, Over-Grown Kid 1” and “Dumb, Lazy Over-Grown Kid 2” in the next Judd Apatow movie), and we shared a lot of the same opinions on the politics of the film (see his take here).  We agreed the filmmakers didn’t bother to answer several important questions, not the least of which:

1)  Why are these men in Iraq? Especially in the particularly dangerous field of bomb diffusion?  I am a young man, athletic, and of military age.  I routinely ask myself what is it that drives the incredible men and women who serve our country in combat? Staff Sergeant James does it because he is a junkie for war, his heroism emanating from his addiction to the adrenaline rush, not from his character.  In fact, none of the characters were motivated by anything upbeat or inspirational. Nothing about fighting for something bigger than oneself, quashing evil around the world, or saving innocent, oppressed people from tyranny.

2) Who are the Iraqis? Boal and Bigelow don’t seem to care. The Iraqis portrayed in “The Hurt Locker,” just like in every other Hollywood Iraq War blockbuster, are faceless, nameless, and utterly lame people who do nothing more than herd goats and sell bootlegged copies of “Pink Panther 2” to our troops. The way the Iraqis are portrayed in the film, I wouldn’t lend them my lunch money, much less lay my life on the line for them.  These Iraqis weren’t even characters.  They were extras.  This was an Iraq War movie and it had nothing to do with Iraqis.

There are other moments in the film that are blatantly anti-war. David Morse makes a bizarre cameo as a Colonel who makes a decision to let a just-wounded Iraqi civilian/suspect die for no apparent reason—implying, of course, that the field commander is a hate-filled bigot air-raiding villages and killing civilians.  This is 100% incidental to the plot and only serves to prop up the anti-war agenda.

Despite the universally glowing reviews the film is receiving in the mainstream media, the movie itself has flaws beyond it’s ideological portrayal of our military. Particularly, no scene is related to the next and it is almost tension free except when they play the “Jaws” music.  The troops are caricatures rather than realistic American servicemen, but performances by Renner and Mackie are impressive nonetheless.

Yet, for those of you who view war movies with a heightened sense of Hollywood’s political agenda, for those you who still have Hollywood’s previous Iraq War offerings fresh in your minds, for those of you who anxiously await the Iraq War film finally portraying our troops as the heroes and liberators all but a few of them are, this is not the movie for you. You’ll see the matrix as soon as that epigraph hits the screen and it will be a malignant distraction until the credits roll.

The junkets are simple. You sit in a hotel room with other writers and one by one the film’s participants stop by for a few minutes. So, in no particular order, as a group we had the chance to interview Bigelow, screenwriter Mark Boal (”In the Valley of Elah”), who researched the film in Iraq, and actors Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty.

All were charming and personable to be sure, but whenever politics or previous Iraq War films came up, things would get a little tense and surreal as each responded by assuring us they weren’t worried because “Hurt Locker” wasn’t at all political. Again and again, the film was described as a straight-forward war picture that just happened to be set in Iraq.

Obviously with these anti-Iraq films flopping at a resounding 100% rate, you can understand why the subject was uncomfortable, but the disconnect between the film I saw just a few days earlier and what the participants seemed to sincerely believe was an apolitical action film, was striking.

Here are some of the story beats. [minor spoiler warning]

The film opens declaring its theme in writing: War is a Drug.

Renner [pictured above] plays Staff Sergeant William James, a soldier unable to function in the real world or sustain a normal relationship with his family, including a young child. War’s turned him into a reckless adrenaline addict who constantly puts himself and the men he’s in charge of in danger when defusing IEDs.

Actor David Morse has a cameo as a field commander, Colonel Reed, who’s portrayed as sadistic and slightly unstable. After an Iraqi civilian/suspect is shot, Reed’s informed the man’s life can be saved if medics are called in immediately. Reed refuses to even consider it, and as the dying man bleeds out, exhibits an unsettling admiration for James’s cowboy ways.

After an Iraqi cab driver (who inexplicably plowed through a road block) is roughly subdued, James says to the troopers handcuffing him, “If he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure the hell is now.”

As the armored vehicle carrying our protagonists passes by, a group of Iraqi children angrily hurl rocks at them.

Naturally, there’s the “They all look alike” remark directed at the Iraqi people by one of the leads.

And the Iraqi people get the worst of it. Something all these anti-war films share in common is a refusal to put a real human face on the people our military are fighting and dying for (this is the case in many anti-Vietnam war films, as well). To do so, to give the Iraqis humanity, works against the abandon-them-to-embarrass-George Bush goal. So instead of portraying them as people — as real, relatable human beings worthy of support and liberty — they’re stripped of humanity and turned into story-props: Villains, victims, foul-mouthed hustlers, or strange alien beings who keep an awkward distance and mourn the dead by yelling savagely at the sky.

Director Kathryn Bigelow

During the interviews, I didn’t press these specifics. They were emphatic the film was apolitical, so the question could only come off as argumentative. Besides, the plot points speak for themselves. How I interpret them is my opinion. Others may feel different. But I did ask everyone the actors what they thought drove the men who volunteered for the Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) squad, which, though obviously dangerous, is difficult to get accepted into because of the skill level and personality requirements.

Only Renner (who memorably portrayed a heroic soldier in “28 Weeks Later“) had an answer. He remarked that the EOD personnel he spent time with while preparing for the role enjoyed the work and the bump in pay. It also offered unique career opportunities after military life was over. That’s a perfectly good answer and no doubt true.

However, the rest looked as though no one had ever asked that question before, which is interesting. You would think that this very “motivation” would be the prime characteristic in creating the foundation of the characters. This and the film’s actual portrayal of these characters makes clear that a sense of duty or a selfless desire to help others and serve a cause bigger than one’s self wasn’t a motivation remotely near the universe of anyone’s consideration.

To their credit, when it came to the military, all the participants spoke with respect, but there was certainly a disconnect, and it shows in the film.

“The Hurt Locker” starts it theatrical roll-out June 26th.

My review will post next week.

UPDATE: June 15th 7:37 a.m.: While preparing a follow-up interview, I reviewed the recordings of the junket and have updated the post to correct a misintepretation of my notes.

The film’s second trailer hit the Internet today and, as I sit here wearing my (apparently passe) Camp Liberty t-shirt, I must say it looks pretty good.

– 

Billed as the “first non-political Iraq War film,” “Hurt Locker” follows the story of Staff Sergeant William James, a maverick bomb removal expert who leads a team trying to save lives – including their own.

It was directed by Kathryn Bigalow, who is herself something of a maverick.

Bigalow has made her name in Hollywood as one of the only female directors of action films. Her credits include “K19: The Widowmaker,” “Point Break” and “Strange Days.”

That experience is evident in the trailer. Jeremy Renner’s Sergeant James is just the type of iconoclast Bigalow identifies with. Plus, the explosions look great.

The film received strong reviews on the Fall film fest circuit, especially for Renner’s “career-making” turn as James.

It will be released on June 26 so the rest of us can judge for ourselves.