My wife and I finally caught up with The Hurt Locker on Netflix. I always felt bad that I never saw it. Turns out my instincts to avoid it were in fact right on the money.

The first half of The Hurt Locker is okay, not good, but somewhat interesting because of the gritty portrait of military life over in that hell hole. Dialog is minimal, and character development is about at comic book level, but as a simplistic visual portrait of war-torn Iraq it hangs together, barely. It even has one legitimately good scene (when Anthony Mackie talks with Specialist Eldridge about blowing up Jeremy Renner,) and it has a few interesting narrative possibilities scattered about, which unfortunately never go anywhere. But at a certain point the movie just falls apart – actually, my wife identified the point exactly: it’s the scene where the two guys are punching each other in the stomach for fun, about half way through the film.

After this point, The Hurt Locker becomes kind of pointless and boring. The story, already weak, completely stops developing, and suddenly you’ve seen enough scenes of guys walking around pointing guns at people and shouting instructions at them, and “shady” Iraqis peering suspiciously out of windows. Suddenly the visceral thrill of watching Renner deactivate bombs has lost its freshness. You don’t drift off completely during the second half, because someone is always in danger of violent death, which ensures a certain minimum level of viewer engagement. But whatever fleeting narrative hopes were kindled during the first half of the movie are bitterly squelched in the second half. And the film’s ending was, in my opinion, terribly done.

I think the film would have been better if they had not killed off Guy Pearce, in which case I’m not sure they would even have needed Renner’s character. Pearce, Mackie, and Brian Geraghty had a nice chemistry about them, and I think a better story could have been developed around these three, provided someone was willing to write some actual dialog. With the elimination of Pearce and the introduction of Renner, the story becomes all about what a crazy fucker Renner is, which frankly is not very interesting.

I understand that The Hurt Locker is one of the most lauded films of the prior decade, but like so many Oscar winners, it strikes me as incredibly overrated.