• Suomeksi

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama ”The Hurt Locker” is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. – With her strength of revealing character through action, Bigelow comes closer to the tradition of Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, and other bygone practitioners of the classic Hollywood war movie than to today’s dominant breed of studio A-listers, who create action at the expense of character. Not that ”The Hurt Locker”, which I take to be the best American fi lm since Paul Thomas Anderson’s ”There Will Be Blood”, much resembles any war movie we’ve ever seen before. Here, combat is more often a solitary rather than a group endeavor — a lone man tracing a rat’s nest of wires back to its source, or exchanging long-distance fi re with a single sniper across a vast desert expanse.

– SCOTT FOUNDAS, VILLAGE VOICE