"The Hurt Locker" Detonates

For all the explosive buzz surrounding Kathryn Bigelow's tour-de-force bomb squad spectacle "The Hurt Locker," it seemed almost inevitable that, when the film finally opened in U.S. theaters a full nine months after its Toronto premiere last September, it would limp into theaters having buckled under the weight of its own praise. Early word was golden, with critical blurbs declaring the film a revolutionary masterpiece plastered across its very first theatrical trailer and the most preliminary of print efforts.

Summit Entertainment, responsible for turning "Twilight" into the inexplicable cultural phenomenon it has become, and guaranteeing profit margins for the next three years until the franchise runs its four-part course, deftly acquired "The Hurt Locker" during its festival run last fall, sitting pretty on the buzz-magnet while adoring critics fussed over the move and demanded the film's release. Smartly hedging its bets until a late-breaking confirmation of a rumored platform launch in late June, Summit has unleashed the full fury of Bigelow's immersive, relentlessly tense war zone in a slow-burn expansion to capitalize on rapturous applause from big city critics' and the art-house crowds that follow their advice. This shrewd distribution pattern could result in the first crossover from upscale markets into the mainstream, where the ravenous appetite for the latest breathtaking action spectacle awaits a sneak-attack from this summer's most visceral and explosive cinematic experience.

Within 15 minutes, "The Hurt Locker" establishes a transportive sense of verisimilitude that gives Bigelow the career opportunity she's been waiting for since bursting into Hollywood some 20 years ago with absurdly serious cult classics like "Point Break" and "Blue Steel." Long known for her uncanny ability to depict the extreme measures taken by tough guy prototypes as both convenient set pieces for crafting pure escapism and incisions into the modern male psyche, Bigelow has been limited by the material she's given, the demands of studio suits, probably even her own vision.

Whatever the forces that conspired to keep her previous efforts from really popping, they're nowhere to be found in "The Hurt Locker," which really does eviscerate the established standard of the "Iraq war movie" to deliver a ferocious blast of summertime entertainment. Brimming with masculine conflict, explosive tension and psychological depth unlike any of its genre predecessors, "The Hurt Locker" has one of Oscar's 10 newly expanded Best Picture nominations fixed squarely in its crosshairs.

Best known for his smarmy supporting work in excellent ensemble dramas like "North Country" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," Jeremy Renner moves front-and-center as Bigelow's protagonist, Staff Sgt. Will James, a chain-smoking badass who is shipped into 2004-era Iraq to fill the position vacated by his predecessor (played by Guy Pearce, Bigelow's unique spin on the ill-fated Drew Barrymore cameo in "Scream") in the film's crackling opener. James is essentially a modern version of the standard male archetype from countless westerns past, but Bigelow's measured direction and Renner's range of expressive nuance preclude convention from holding firm.

In his relationships with the film's two other main characters -- the cocky, usually level-headed Sgt. J.T. Sanborne (Anthony Mackie) and the young, relatively meek supervisor Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) -- and, ultimately, with his own true self, James exhibits a gamut seeming behavioral contradicitions that Bigelow manages to justify through a paralyzing series of set pieces, each of which place James against the clock and mounting external odds (sniper fire, traumatized civilians, a war of wills between soldiers), holding viewers in a near-perpetual state of breathless suspension as her protagonist goes about his business.

It is a testament to journalist Mark Boal's incisive screenplay that Bigelow has such rich, conflicted characters at her disposal, as the central trio of soldiers remain firmly fixed at the film's center, keeping a wide distance from the tendency for action to overwhelm the film's vital human presence. There are several moments of genuine, tender connection between the three men, even as an undercurrent of dreadful tension perpetually simmers between dueling alpha males James and Sandborne, straddling the fine line between vengeful bloodlust and homoerotic surrender.

In one scene, the men trade drunken punches to the stomach as young Eldridge plays referee, watching his two superiors wrestle around like schoolboys with a taunting attraction neither of them can resist. Before the scene is over, either James or Sandborne has pinned the other to the ground and is affecting a sexualized yee-haw thrill as he rides his bucking opponent, who suddenly lunges up with a knife to the throat of the domineer.

Mackie and Geraghty are both outstanding as Sandborne and Eldridge, respectively, and each actor invests in his role beyond the requisite standard conflict between masculine aggression and emotional vulnerability. Working from Boal's script, the actors make the most of what are essentially supporting roles to create, alongside indesputible protagonist Sgt. James, a trio of fully-realized lead performances through which Bigelow pumps the adrenaline on overdrive.

Bigelow has always specialized in taking cinematic action to the limit of full-tilt escapism, trafficking in hypermasculine characters whose conventional gender roles become extrapolated into the spellbinding set pieces that string together to form a narrative thread for testosterone-junkie entertainment. "The Hurt Locker" is easily her highest achievement, finally giving the dominant female force in action movies a fighting claim for King of the Mountain status.