THE HURT LOCKER – kathryn bigelow – 7.8 / 10

There are a few pieces of advice you often hear in relation to movies. One of them that’s undoubtedly true is that a good ending forgives a lot. A film that has a solid ending leaves the audience walking out of the theater feeling good about the movie and thus more likely to talk positively about it. You might call this The Sixth Sense effect. The reverse is also true. A great movie that ends poorly cancels out all the good will it’d built up to that point and leaves the audience feeling unsatisfied. You could call it the Unbreakable effect.

If I could add my own corollary to this particular rule it would be that a solid first ten minutes are almost equally important. If you can make a movie with a good first ten minutes and great last fifteen, you’ll be needing a tux on Oscar night. It doesn’t matter if the intervening hour or so is mediocre, maudlin or just plain boring. Start well and finish strong and you’ve got it made.

The Hurt Locker is a case in point. It’s opening ten minutes, featuring Guy Pierce as the commander of an EOD bomb disposal unit in Iraq that’s trying to defuse a particularly nasty IED, are as taut and gripping as anything you’ll see this year. The scene is tense and hectic but Pierce plays it cool, his calm demeanor only underscoring just how difficult and dangerous a job these guys are doing. As the scene ticks along and the tension ratchets higher and higher, Bigelow does everything she can to make the sequence really sing. There’s slow motion, some nifty tracking shots and some gunplay. Looking back on it after having seen the rest of the film, it seems probable that half the film’s budget was spent in those first few minutes. But it works. The scene is great.

The same goes for the ending. I won’t describe it since doing so would spoil it (though, truth be told, it’s not like you don’t see it coming) but suffice it to say that it’s kick ass in just the right kind of way. It’s cool and bittersweet and affecting in a way that the rest of the film really doesn’t ever try to be. And because of that, The Hurt Locker goes out on a very high note.

So, to review: great beginning + solid ending = massive critical praise. At least that’s the only reason that I can think of for The Hurt Locker getting the sort of reception it’s been getting. Because, frankly, the middle two-thirds of the film are just okay. Sure, Jeremy Renner is great as a bomb disposal tech (though he has those Mickey Rourke fingernails that I personally find incredibly disturbing in a train wreck sort of way). And his character is a very interesting one around which to base a movie like this. And yeah, some of the bomb defusing scenes are pretty nifty. But after three or four of them, the film’s shtick starts to get old. Find a bomb (in a car, on a person, in a body), stare at it while sweating, defuse. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Maybe I’m being a little unfair. The Hurt Locker is, after all, just an action movie. And judging it as an action film, it’s easily among the best of the year (if not the best). But there’s no way a film that’s only superficially satisfying should be getting the amount of praise it has been. My guess is either that this is just a really bad year for movies (true) or that the press want to see an ex-wife (Bigelow) / ex-husband (James Cameron, for his execrable Avatar) duel for the Best Director trophy, so they’re talking up two unexceptional films. Or maybe it really is because The Hurt Locker has a great opening sequence and a very solid ending. Maybe that’s all you really need to win Oscars these days.