The Hurt Locker (2009)
The Hurt Locker (2009) — Brilliantly acted all around and tense as all hell. Not what I necessarily would have expected from Kathryn Bigelow, the director of Near Dark and Point Break, but then again I guess you really never should pigeonhole a director. Jeremy Renner portrays a man who thinks he’s invincible. Anthony Mackie plays a guy all-too-aware that he’s not. Drama ensues and stuff blows up. And I mentioned already that it was tense but I cannot emphasize the point enough: tense. It’s about people who defuse bombs in Iraq. The plot description is tense. It’s that same question as I’ve been seeing in the commercials for that paramedic show: What makes someone run towards something anyone else would run away from? This movie attempts to answer that question and does it probably a lot better than that TV show will. Episodic cameos by Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Evangeline Lilly (bringing the hotness) add an extra dimension to the film sort of giving a larger context to the events surrounding the main characters. What I came away from the movie thinking was, whether or not you think the United States has any business in the Middle East, you have to admire the balls on the men and women in uniform doing their duty over there. The movie isn’t necessarily about courage, but that’s what I left thinking about.
Persistence of Vision 