When maverick Sergeant, James (Jeremy Renner) takes over a highly trained bomb disposal team in Iraq conflict, his two subordinates, Sanborn (Mackie) and Eldridge (Geraghty), are immediately put out by his reckless methodology. James responds with cheery indifference toward the protests his new colleagues, his hostile surroundings and his own mortality.
In conversation with Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock famously defined suspense with a neat illustration - “There (are) two people having breakfast and there’s a bomb under the table. If it explodes, that’s a surprise. But if it doesn’t...” Kathryn Bigelow, that most cine-literate of directors, can’t be unfamiliar with the maxim. Throughout The Hurt Locker, she works that most inherently cinematic of devices - the unexploded bomb - for surprise, suspense and just a little frisson of fetishism. No wonder the film has received the best American notices of 2009.
There have been some caveats, of course. If The Hurt Locker succeeds where an entire unlovely sub-genre has failed - Lions for Lambs, anyone? Redacted? - that’s because it’s This Year’s Top Gun, and not This Year’s Battle of Algiers. Ms. Bigelow does not entirely ignore the political context; she illustrates her genre chops in fine reportage style with occasional caustic Beckettian asides from her troops.
This may not amount to the most politically sophisticated film to emerge from the Iraq conflict, but as a movie, it’s the pony to beat.