OK, there’s no actual surfing insurgents in The Hurt Locker but director Kathryn Bigelow’s masterpiece of action and bromance, Point Break, certainly sprang to mind whilst watching her latest effort. Here too we find a love/hate relationship between two diametrically opposed alphas – one playing by the rules, the other pissing on the book. Jeremy Renner, previously unknown to me, creates a complex and nuanced character in his role as the maverick US bomb diffusal officer in Iraq, at odds with his straight laced partner. And the character is revealed mainly through action, not through dialogue and backstory. The action/suspense sequences come thick and fast. This female director knows what makes guys tick. An artists gender really shouldn’t affect how you think of the work but the fact that Bigelow is the only female making action movies in Hollywood today really does make you sit up and shout ‘You go, girl!’, especially as she’s doing it better than any of the boys right now. She understands what Michael Bay and McG seem unable to grasp – we don’t give a toss about the explosions unless we care about the people getting blowed up, duh. And The Hurt Locker really does make us care about the people in the firing line.

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