Not great, but good enough

Critics are calling “The Hurt Locker” the most intense, best movie to come out of the war in Iraq. Some are calling it the best movie of the year. And they’re right.

Up to a point.

That nagging feeling you get while watching the film that something is missing eventually coalesces into an unmistakable truth: This movie has no story.

It’s strictly an episodic film; soldiers go out on a bunch of dangerous missions and we never know whether some or all of them will not return.

On the fighters’ level, war may very well be exactly like that. So “The Hurt Locker” brilliantly portrays the experience of war from the point of view of the men fighting one.

But that doesn’t make for a dramatic movie.

The extraordinary tension, which is built up so magnificently well, starts to dissipate like air out of a tire. There is no sense of progress. The narrative does not move toward anything other than the day the unit’s tour of duty is over. And that is why the climax and conclusion feel like such letdowns -- the plot does not necessarily move toward them, they just happen.

Still not convinced? Consider this: Two main characters have an important conversation at the end that is supposed to sum up their feelings about what they do. But they same conversation could have been held at the beginning of the movie or at any point in between. It explains or reveals nothing.

This is not to diminish the riveting work of director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal. They have created a movie that succinctly re-creates the life-or-death intensity of war. They just don’t know what to do with it.

Jeremy Renner stars as Sgt. Bill James, an expert in disarming bombs. At one point he admits to having disarmed 873 bombs, a figure that impresses a colonel, who admiringly calls him a “wild man” (colonels do not come off well in this picture).

James is a wild man, true, and a maverick. But his go-it-alone antics worry Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who knows that a bomb squad needs to work together as a well-coordinated team if its members are going to survive, especially in a hostile land.

And in this film, Baghdad (played by Jordan) is a hostile land. What the filmmakers do best is to communicate the suspenseful insecurity felt by the soldiers when they see Iraqi residents. They don’t know who is on their side, who is just watching and who may be hiding a cell phone, ready to detonate a bomb.

Bigelow shoots the entire picture with hand-held cameras, which certainly increase the audience’s anxiety. Hand-held cameras have become a cliché over the last few years, but Bigelow’s use of them rivals the work of Paul Greengrass of “The Bourne Ultimatum,” the undisputed master of the hand-held camera.

The difference is that Greengrass knows the importance of a story. Bigelow and Boal have forgotten.