War is a drug (and he needs to score)

I can see why, in a relatively underwhelming year for award-worthy films, The Hurt Locker is getting lots of attention, but I was a bit disappointed in this Iraq war story which centers on Jeremy Renner (pictured above in full protective gear) as an Army soldier who is part of a bomb defusing squad. The acting is good, especially Renner who underplays magnificently, except in one barracks-wrestling scene in which he overplays equally well. The director, Kathryn Bigelow, handles the tension of the bomb defusing scenes nicely (though as with most movies which contain any action at all these days, I could have done with a little less of the constant camera jittering). The atmosphere of paranoia and a kind of forced camaraderie among the squad members are also nicely played.

For me, the problem is the narrative, or lack thereof. Renner joins the squad and immediately gets a reputation for taking daring risks and staying cool (some would say foolishly so). And that's pretty much it: he and his squad go on missions, risk their lives, blow off steam that night (or try to), and do the same thing the next day. There is a subplot in which Renner bonds with an Iraqi teenager and loses it when he finds the boy dead, having apparently been fitted out to be a human bomb--there is more to this story which I won't spoil here. However, we never get any sense of what makes Renner tick (no "bomb" pun intended): we know he's tightly wound and is a man of few words, and at the end, when he returns home to his wife and kid, he misses his job and signs up for another tour of duty.

The message of the movie, as such, is presented blatantly at the opening in a quote: "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug." Unfortunately, the rest of the movie never gets much beyond that simplistic (though undoubtedly true) phrase, aside from some facile comparisons between war and video games. Though I am not a big fan of action movies or video games or anything very adventurous, I am not immune to the visceral pleasures of such things; this movie, however, rarely got me into Renner's mindset, perhaps partly because the audience empathizes more with the other squad members (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, both very good though overshadowed by Renner) who are mystified and a little scared of Renner. Good stories show rather than tell, but ultimately, the movie doesn't really tell me or show me how war is a drug for Renner's character.