Danger: IEDs - Military Movies - Military Times

Danger: IEDs

Films about war have been a mainstay of the movie business since its inception. But for whatever reason, the Iraq war has proven to be stubbornly barren ground for Hollywood.

If any film can change that, it’s director Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” mainly because while the setting is Iraq, this is not an “Iraq war” movie.

It’s just a great war movie.

And as all great war movies do, it avoids broader geopolitics to put a tight, intense, ground-level focus on the grunts doing the sweating and bleeding.

That’s hardly the film’s only ace in the hole. The grunts at the center of the action aren’t the familiar infantrymen or pilots, but explosive ordnance disposal experts — an eclectic vocation that puts an intriguing and irresistible twist on things.

As Bigelow surely recognized when she first saw the script by Mark Boal, a journalist who was embedded with the Army in Iraq in 2004, this is not about the violence of war, but rather the absence of violence.

The film is filled with moments as eerily quiet as they are starkly terrifying. When a bomb-disposal team faces the mother of all improvised explosive devices — a spidery nest of eight serially rigged 155mm shells — you can’t help holding your breath and cringing in your seat, on edge for that big bang to erupt in a smoky cloud laced with fine red mist.

A third reason the film works so well is the canny decision by Bigelow and Boal to cast as their leads three fine but relatively unknown actors, and then drop in brief supporting cameos from more familiar faces.

Two of the three leads are the steely, no-nonsense Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and the young, inexperienced Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). On their three-man EOD team, Sanborn coordinates the mission while Eldridge’s primary duty is to provide covering fire.

The actual dismantling of the bombs is handled by the team’s third member. In the harrowing opening scene, that’s Sgt. Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce, one of the aforementioned recognizable faces), and the fact that it’s a cameo pretty much tells you how the scene plays out.

Thompson is soon replaced by Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), who radically changes the team dynamic — not necessarily for the better — with an unnervingly reckless approach to his work.

Once the three are in place, the film explores the dynamics among the men as they head out on their missions. (The film is set in 2004, when IEDs were just coming into vogue as the insurgent weapon of choice).

Sanborn and James repeatedly clash over their vastly different styles, with Eldridge, seeking a mentor to help him stave off his growing sense of disillusionment and dread, caught between them.

A main theme of Boal’s script is the addictive nature of combat, set up by a simple, powerful quote from author Chris Hedges: “War is a drug.”

James is the poster boy for this idea. Bigelow and Boal slowly peel back the bomb expert’s layers to reveal a bravado that borders on psychosis. He knows he’s being consumed by the adrenaline rush but just can’t give it up, not even for his wife (Evangeline Lilly) and baby back home.

The film is jammed with memorable moments, including a long scene in the open desert in which the EOD team stumbles across some British troops and then gets pinned down by some very persistent insurgent snipers. (Hey, is that Ralph Fiennes as one of the Brit commandos?) The sequence will make you just as hot, thirsty and sweaty as the grunts on screen.

Bigelow — who has a special place in my heart for directing my all-time favorite Keanu Reeves flick, “Point Break” (“You’re goin’ down, Bodhi!”) — gives the film a gritty, almost documentary feel that serves the subject matter well.

She and Boal make only one wrong move, a scene in which James heads off the reservation into downtown Baghdad on a misguided revenge mission — in cammie pants and a sweatshirt hoodie, no less. It’s an off-key sequence that should have been left on the cutting room floor.

But that slight miscue aside, “The Hurt Locker” is the bomb.

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Rated R for violence, language. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.

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EOD soldiers give their take on “The Hurt Locker”

Discuss: “The Hurt Locker”