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.