Scott Foundas filed a review of The Hurt Locker yesterday from Toronto at his LA Weekly blog:
The Hurt Locker saves its most inspired strokes for last, when Renner returns home after his tour of duty and Bigelow, in a 10-minute sequence of pure cinema, creates a more palpable sense of the disorientation experienced by many a combat vet suddenly extracted from the war zone than Stop-Loss managed in its entirety. Finally, as Toronto hits the half-way mark, here is another movie worth getting excited about.
WELLS ANGRY ABOUT BUYER WARINESS
Jeffrey Wells is also raving from Toronto about The Hurt Locker:
Something is very wrong with life, the world, human nature and the film business when a movie this knock-down good is still hunting for distribution. I'm obviously aware of all the Iraq War films that died last year but this movie is something else. You don't shun movies like this. If you're a distributor and that's your judgment -- walk away, we can't sell it, we'll lose our shirts -- then you need to get out of the movie business and start selling refrigerators or cars. A buyer told me a little while ago that it only cost about $15 million or less. How could the numbers not work?
...I don't want to reveal too much here, but the only thing that didn't feel quite right was a close-to-the-end sequence when Renner goes home to his (divorced?) wife and kid, and right away we can spot the familiar syndrome of the war veteran who can't quite settle down and groove with a midle-class, comforts-of-home lifestyle. I don't want to register a major complaint about this; it doesn't work against the film as much as it fails to add anything significant. This is probably the best film I've seen at the Toronto Film Festival so far.
The Hurt Locker has since been picked up for U.S. distribution by Summit Entertainment.
Updated: Wednesday, September 10, 2008 1:36 PM CDT
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