The Hurt Locker

I tried to stay awake for The Hurt Locker over the weekend, and mostly failed. In large part it was the character of Will James that lost it for me. He’s a renegade . . . but he gets the job done. He’s a stone cold killer . . . protecting and avenging the innocent. I kept thinking that the screenwriter had probably seen Lethal Weapon 3 and decided, hey, this’d make a pretty good war movie. In fact, they even seem to have lifted some of LW3′s lines: “I’m too old for this shit.”

On top of that, I kept wondering how in the hell this thing has gotten a reputation for realism? I get that the standards for authenticity aren’t real high in Hollywood, but I was having trouble not laughing out loud for the entire second half. Nor does it seem I’m alone in that assessment. Brian Mockenhaupt in the The Atlantic, Kate Hoit in The Huffington Post, and Michael Kamber in the New York Times have all rightfully beat the shit out of the movie for being silly.

What got on my nerves the most, though, was the Iraqi sidekick kid. He existed for no purpose that I could see other than to prove to us that James had a heart. That underneath all the bluster he cared for these poor Iraqis, that he wasn’t there to kill them but to save them. And I knew the minute the kid showed up that he was gonna be dead, and he was gonna be dead by the hands of insurgents, not Americans.

Could have been just me, but I found that as gross an example of turning reality on its head as I’ve seen since Rambo. Those million or so dead Iraqi civilians are ours to own. Not on of ‘em would be dead if we hadn’t started that illegal clusterfuck. Putting the only identified civilian casualty in the flick on the insurgents makes for feel-good Hollywood horseshit, sure, but it’s ugly, cheap, and stupid. That’s not to say that individual soldiers haven’t protected Iraqis, but that kind of Hollywood reductionism to good-guy, protective Americans and bad-guy, murderous insurgents is ahistorical, and borderline jingoistic.

Even worse, as symbols go, it’s as subtle as a sledgehammer. It’s just bad writing. The Iraqi insurgents sacrificing their youth to create body bombs? That’s the kind of horribly over-determined shit that should only exist in made-for-television movies and Hannah Montana episodes.

Anyway, not much of a fan. For a more considered post on the film’s failures, see The Valve.