By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Kathryn Bigelow’s acclaimed Best Picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes.
The allegedly astute and apparently quality-conscious voters at The Academy Awards have a long and rich history of rewarding sub-par (and often terrible, for that matter) films. Consider this desultory list of Best Picture winners: Chicago, Shakespeare In Love, Crash, The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, The Departed, One Battle After Another, Anora, Oppenheimer…and that’s just sticking to the modern era! Don’t get us started on the fifties! The Greatest Show On Earth??!! Puh-lease!
Well, back in 2008, the Oscars rewarded another over-hyped, ridiculously praised and insanely overrated film in the form of The Hurt Locker. At this point, however, we should pause and take time to thank the voters for at least not giving the top gong that year to James Cameron’s simplistic, derivative mega-bore Avatar, possibly the most tedious and pious sci-fi flick ever made. Urgh! And the sequels? Double urgh! But we digress: that’s for another column!
As is their want, the critics went into overdrive with Kathryn Bigelow’s overly familiar, hardly original Iraq war thriller The Hurt Locker, spilling their chardonnay in their rush to praise the film’s “grittiness” and “realism”, as if they’d all actually spent time in The Middle East and knew exactly what it was like. Hell, maybe they had! With the swell of Middle East-themed films and TV shows over the past few decades – Green Zone, Jarhead, The Kingdom, Brothers, The Covenant, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi, American Sniper, the one with Chris Hemsworth on a horse – The Butcher certainly feels like he’s done several tours of duty already.
It’s nearly as bad as the late seventies and eighties, when the likes of The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July, Hamburger Hill and the TV series China Beach and Tour Of Duty made this Butcher feel like he’d spent half his life in the jungles of Vietnam.
The Hurt Locker is also said by many to create the feeling of “being there”, which begs the obvious question: who wants to be stuck in Iraq with a bunch of macho US soldiers who like to play Russian Roulette with their own lives and those around them? The film is also allegedly a brutal insight into the harsh world of the military. Really? It just looks like a film about a bunch of knuckleheads who like to watch things go “boom” to us…
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against Raging Bull, The Castle, Amelie, The Social Network, Argo, Gravity, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, The Artist, Only God Forgives, One Battle After Another, Birdman, Lethal Weapon, Blazing Saddles, Strictly Ballroom, Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
