The Hurt Locker: Revenge of the Critics

The four-trillion dollar Transformers movie marks the first time in memory that a truly bad film has lived up to its hype as a truly bad film, and then some. Michael Bay's latest offering is an unapologetic summer blockbuster that is currently accomplishing the heroic deed of making tons of money while simultaneously making no sense at all. It is already the biggest hit of the year, and what a pity.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen is two and a half-hours too long - without beginning, middle, (or especially) end in sight. You could possibly rearrange many sequences and fanboys wouldn't notice. Forget narrative logic or basic screenwriting rules, but since when was it okay for an action movie to not have a climax? And though occasionally the expensive visual effects resolve themselves into something of intelligence or interest, most of the time the action is at so close a range I couln't tell if this was an Autobot or a Decepticon I was looking at. Not that the movie makes you care. Characters have the depth and reality of, I don't know, childhood toys, and one wonders if there was even a working script for the actors. LeBouf and Duhamel had a lot of lines like 'This is bad!', which was sometimes alternated with 'This is NOT good.' What an awful, awful film. For the geeks, though, there is Megan Fox. For the rest of us....well, it helped to know that one hundred and fifty minutes do pass, however painfully. Revenge is not sweet.

In these dire times, critics have searched high and low for an action film that can answer to the inequities of Michael Bay's disastrously bloated mojo-vehicle - and they have heard a low guttural growl in the form of The Hurt Locker, a Venice/Toronto champion that is currently going into wide release.

Director Kathryn Bigelow's look at an elite bomb disposal squad in a scorched, shattered and war-torn Iraq is a master-class in discipline, pacing, and atmosphere. Most bombs are dismantled before they can be detonated, but here are one hundred and twenty minutes of thumping terror. At the center of this unexpectedly meditative action thriller is a fearsome, commanding performance from Jeremy Renner, and I would love to see some recognition for it as awards season approaches.

Quietly anti-war in its own way, Bigelow's film is also vastly more critic-friendly than Bay's - it looks well-made and inexpensive, has a no-name cast and is working its way into wide release on word of mouth. With the bonus of political relevance and a woman filmmaker at the helm, The Hurt Locker is in every way the antithesis of ersatz auteur Bay, who himself represents the antithesis of meaning, existence, and civilization. Bigelow has banished all the shock and awe, disinterring a shell of stealthy silence in which we feel the sweat on every brow and hear the woosh of every bullet and sense the presence of death. Majestic in the minutiae, The Hurt Locker shows us why the principal virtues of the greatest summer blockbusters ought to be be rhythm and restraint.

A Better Potter

The new Harry Potter Movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is the best entry in the series in a long time. Like Alfonso Cuaron's incomparably staggering execution of the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), here is an occasion for beauty - beauty sublime and sometimes bemused. Jim Broadbent is beyond superlatives in a supporting sketch, and the young cast by now has taken that decisive leap into puberty when uniforms fit in a very different way. Director David Yates has affectionately doled sexual tension into the folds of the otherwise apocalyptic drama, so that The Half-Blood Prince thuds and storms relentlessly with deatheaters and heartbreakers. It's the best kind of lead-in Warner Brothers could have hoped for before the plunge into the two-part finale.

New York, I Don't Love You

Oh, how badly I wish I could have live-blogged the experience of watching New York, Kabir Khan's well-meaning but ill-conceived film about South Asians in the United States after 9/11. Here is a movie that changes gears so often, and sometimes so clumsily, it would have been easier to blog about it every ten minutes than it is to write a full review in retrospect. I hear it's a hit, and I like the fact that New York, hatched in the plush offices of Yash-Raj, searches for something approaching meaningful menace in Manhattan. But it's still an uneasy mess of a film, and ultimately doomed by the same orchestral fanfare and sweeping autumn leaves as all the Johars before it.

In an utterly compromised first half, Khan seems out of his depth. There's a hoary love-triangele plot in the offing, but its shabby and unconvincing, which only makes the orgiastic, musically-announced happiness of it all quite miserable. Abraham, Kaif and Mukesh don't have very much to do here, and they do that pretty well, I guess. That's the first half. Tedious.

By contrast, the last ninety minutes have a lot of plot and punch, and would have made for a better movie by themselves. Repairing the damage done by Irrfan-I-Need-A-Makeover-Khan, playing a - you guessed it - cop, there is a beguilingly tortured performance from an actor whose name I don't even know, playing a Muslim who was detained by the FBI for weeks and weeks after 9/11. He only has two or three scenes, but I'm counting the small mercies. Similarly, while I find it hard to believe that the FBI would ever handle any undercover operation the way they do this one, I was solemnly struck by the Guantanamo Bay/ Abu Ghraib evocativeness of the film's middle passages. There is also a satisfyingly bloody climax, but a perfunctory final scene that looks like it crept back into the film from the cutting floor.

I don't know how I feel about New York in the final analysis. It plays out like a balance sheet, on which some minor victories are accomplished in the shadows of major disasters. I'm not crazy about it, but I don't hate it either; but then again, it usually is hard to hate any movie in which really bad things happen to really good-looking people. I suppose one could be grateful for the compensatory charms of Khan's mannequinish menage de trois, who break out of the pre-interval stolidness to move and melt our cynical hearts. Even Kaif, whose emotive range we sense is restrained by her ongoing battle with the language, comes through. Technical contributions are just fine, with camerawork rapidly approaching that globally standardizing tendency to shake and quiver just a bit every now and then so that things look, you know, 'gritty' and 'real'. The music is superb too, but I can't shake the suspicion that it was written for a film that dealt with lesser evils than urban crime, racial profiling, and global terrorism.

It's a case of Hmmm.