Reviewed by: Greg Mueller

Greg's Score:
7.75

Plot/Story

7

Characters

10

Acting

9

Cinematography

3

Production Design

8

Soundtrack

8

Execution

7

Emotional Impact

10


Review:

I've seen hundreds of horror and thriller movies at this point and none have filled me with fear and dread more than The Hurt Locker. What this film does best is build each scene with so much tension that I'm almost recoiling from the screen because I have legitimate concerns for every character in every scene. Of the roughly two hours of this film, I spent at least an hour and forty-five minutes of it bracing myself for someone to die. You watch Halloween, Friday the 13th, Mission Impossible, Fast and the Furious, and all of those movies have many scenes where you feel safe, where you know nothing is going to happen or at least nothing is going to happen to these couple of characters. Every time Jeremy Renner is on the screen, I'm bracing myself because I just know he's going to die, this is going to be the scene. His first scene, I'm thinking "These bastards put him in the trailers and movie posters to mess with me; they're going to kill him off right now and it hasn't even been fifteen minutes!" Every scene is incredibly tense and just seconds from boiling over. It helps that the acting is prefect from everyone except a few child extras who didn't seem to understand what emotion there were supposed to be expressing. Really, I have exactly one issue with this film and it's one that really bothers me. I hate the cinematography. We get some neat shots and the tone is set just fine, but we, seemingly randomly, switch between unnecessary shaky cam, handheld held by someone who can't stand still, scenes that are shot like a documentary, and professional looking shots. Within the same scene, we'll have the camera sway left and right, jump around as if we are walking/running alongside the characters, switch to a stationary shot, aerial shot, and the something straight out of The Office including the zoom into a character's reaction. I get why action movies do the shaky cam thing, but the camera is so inconsistent that it gets really distracting. It's not like every time our characters run we get the shaky cam or every establishing shot looks like the Planet Earth crew shot it. It's ridiculously inconsistent. The characters are so deep that I want to focus on them and analyze what must be going through their heads, not wondering why this scene is shot like we're watching a squirrel bury his nuts on a Discovery Channel show. The movie does get a little repetitive because there really isn't a plot, but more of a "we follow these characters for a while and these are some things that happen" movie, but I was still fully immersed in the movie until we get another stupid camera switch and now some drunk guy is holding the camera while he tries no to fall down. All I needed was Kathryn Bigelow to calm down and just stick with the same shot for a little bit.

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