Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Review: The Hurt Locker

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Title: The Hurt Locker
Distributor: Summit Entertainment
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Writer(s): Mark Boal (written by)
Staring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes
MPAA Rating: Rated R for war violence and language.
Running Time: 131 min (2 hr and 10 min)
Synopsis: Iraq. Forced to play a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse in the chaos of war, an elite Army bomb squad unit must come together in a city where everyone is a potential enemy and every object could be a deadly bomb

Other Reviews

Critics:

Roger Ebert:
3
½ Stars
Michael Phillips: 3 ½ Stars
EW: Lisa Schwarzbaum: B


Other Sites:

At The Movies:
Ben Mankiewicz: Skip It, Ben Lyons: See It
Rotten Tomatoes: T-Meter: 98% (Fresh), Top Critics: 94% (Fresh), RT Community: 91% (Fresh)
Metacritic: Critics: 93 out of 100, Users: 7.6 out of 10
MRQE Metric: 83: (55.5% A, 32.1% B, 10.3% C, 0.0% D, and 0.0% F)
Yahoo Movies: Critics: A- Users: A-

My Review

Source Material: The Hurt Locker is written by Mark Boal, a freelance writer who was embedded with a bomb squad

Acting and Dialogue: B: The acting was good and there was no
real noticeable cheesy lines but over all there was very little character development.

Art Direction: A:
It top notch war movie art.

Cinematography: A-: I felt like I was in Iraq...I also like the cinéma vérité style of film making. There was one negative aspect that friend point out to me and that was for every explosion they would zoom out.

Direction: C:
Very slow in my opinion, I am not going to lie I checked my watch couple of times. There was little to no story development. But even with the bad development the film had great suspense. I was somewhat on edge the whole duration of the film because I was waiting for the next type of explosion, and how it would unfold on screen.

Sound and Music: C:
Explosions that's it, well that's what I remember.

VFX: B: The special effect in the film were great, including make-up, especially on a small budget like this one.

Overall: B-: I am sure it will a least get a nomination for a Oscar because it just one those type of movies, that and now there is ten spots to fill for best picture.
I thought it was going to be way more epic than what it was. I saw the trailer and the guy pulls up a string with 6-8 bombs attached. At that point I thought that scene would be near the end, I was wrong it is near the beginning. With that scene being in that particular part of the film it killed the excitement of this film being awesomely epic.

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