I’m not surprised by the success of “Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.” What does surprise me is how many people seemed to enjoy it. One of my close, anonymous friends defended it by saying, “Sometimes I just like a movie filled with explosions.” Of course you do. I do too sometimes. But do we really have to settle for the lowest common denominator to get them? Yesterday I saw Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” and for a summer action film, you could not do better.
In a summer that has included “quality” popcorn flicks like “Wolverine” and “Terminator: Salvation,” we really haven’t had many great summer films that are geared towards adults and set in reality. Every film seems to be about super heroes, robots, time travel, and museum exhibits coming to life. Forgive me now while I act like a crotchety, old man. Back in the 90’s, we had mindless action films that still had a mind. Some would argue in defense of Bigelow’s “Point Break,” but since I just had a fight with a friend last week over the stupidity of that film, let me add another example, Jan de Bont’s “Speed.” Both films blew up things real good, but they were also contemporary action films about real people, or at least as real as Keanu Reeves can get.
“Speed” in particular had one or two memorable explosions, but most the film featured tense situations on the bus, exciting high-speed chases, and crackling dialogue while the characters waited for a solution to the predicament they were in. Ah yes, the waiting. That’s what has been lost in the summer action game. Hollywood is so afraid of boring the audience (never mind the fact that many of these films are an excruciating two and half hours plus) that they barely let five minutes go by without an action set piece or giant explosion. Dialogue and character development come second, but only if we’re lucky.
“The Hurt Locker” has everything that we used to crave in summer action films, and more. There is plenty of action, shoot-outs, and explosions, but perhaps the fact that it is being reserved primarily for the art house crowds, and not being given the 4,000 screen treatment that a giant robot movie would get, is due to the fact that this is ultimately a war movie. There hasn’t been a successful film to come out of the unpopular Iraq war. The bad films can be really bad, and the few good ones can still seem like an unpleasant and preachy chore to sit through. I had this fear going in to “The Hurt Locker,” which may be why I waited for the second week of its release to go. Did I really want to watch bomb squad soldiers die in Iraq when I could just go see “Up” for the third time?
“The Hurt Locker” opens with an intense, eight-minute scene, in which the audience can feel impending doom. A malfunctioning robot wheel causes a bomb to be manually dismantled. The staff sergeant nervously jokes as he puts on his protective suit, while his team carefully watches the dozens of onlookers in windows above the street. Any one of them could have a cell phone that will set off the bomb. A man runs up to a soldier and distracts him by asking where he’s from. A taxi drives recklessly into the street. I watched this scene as if I was on the street with these soldiers. I kept squirming to get comfortable, with my stomach tied in knots, knowing full well that the bomb could go off at any moment. I was relieved when the sequence was over, but I was also concerned for my enjoyment of the film. I didn’t know if I could take another two hours of feeling like that. Maybe I would have been better off at “Transformers 2,” where I at least would know that Michael Bay would keep the explosions coming so often that they would start to feel routine and never surprise me.
Fortunately for me, my stomach remained unknotted for the rest of the film, and I felt more entertained than uneasy. I didn’t expect “The Hurt Locker” to be so fascinating, relatable, and most of all, funny. The incredible and mostly unknown Jeremy Renner plays a Staff Sergeant so cocky and fearless that he often reminds us of a fictional super hero type. But this isn’t a bad thing. The war setting is always surrounding the characters, but we have a lot of fun living the adventure with them. The tension is constantly building, but it gives us a chance to breathe, and patiently wait with the characters, as they suffer through thrilling monotony, such as when they look through their sniper scope on a window for hours, just on the off chance that there’s one more shooter hiding inside.
“The Hurt Locker” is probably the best live action film I have seen this year. Most of my “artist friends” are going to see it, and they were always going to see it, with or without my recommendation. I’m not speaking to them. I’m speaking to the rest of you: the people who just want a nice distraction in the summer. Some stage and spectacle, with the occasional explosion. I want you to know that not all the summer action films are boring exercises in masturBAYtion. Likewise, not all the art house films out there are black and white meditations on Francis Ford Coppola’s daddy issues. There is an alternative, people. This is the kind of film that USED to qualify as a summer movie. I really hope that “The Hurt Locker” becomes a sleeper hit of the summer, and ends up playing nationwide soon. Given the fact that its per-screen average last week was 14 thousand dollars, while “Transformer 2’s” was only 10 thousand, I think there’s a pretty good chance of that happening.
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