People like ourselves and Jeffrey Wells have been constantly asking: When is Kathryn Bigelow’s critically acclaimed film “The Hurt Locker” coming out in regular theaters?
We’ve heard summer, but there’s been no concrete release date scheduled as of yet. At New York Comic Con this weekend, lead actor Jeremy Renner, and the IGN moderator did not addressed the film’s delayed or unannounced theatrical release, so we shouted out as the actor left the stage, “When’s it coming out?” and Renner seemed not entirely sure, but said, “I’m not sure. Summer? Last I heard was August.” We believe a “late summer” release was thrown around once before, but Renner’s vague estimation is still probably the closest thing any of us have heard to a proper release. Luckily for us, we’ll see it in March at the Walter Reade’s one-off Film Comment’s film selections fest (tickets are on sale now eager New Yorkers).
About explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) experts in Iraq, Summit Entertainment screened 12 minutes of the film for New York Comic Con audiences and the intense and nerve-wracking tension of Renner dismantling a gigantic car bomb were easily the best footage we saw all weekend. It goes a long way to demonstrate the prowess of Bigelow’s direction and editing that almost no action happened throughout the entire scene, but watching the experts try and defuse explosives in the middle of a hot zone was riveting (Anthony Mackie also stars and was in the clip; and Guy Pearce is also in the film).
One our Playlist members also asked the dreaded, [paraphrasing] “How do you market this film so it’s not lumped in with the Iraq War films?” question, i.e. how do you separate this from box-office poison? And Renner’s response was that “The Hurt Locker,” is simply not an Iraq War movie.
“I think what separates ‘The Hurt Locker’ from other Iraq war films is that it’s not an Iraq War film,” he insisted. “It has zero politics, it’s not pro or anti war, it’s an action movie first and foremost. It’s not a platform for anything else. The Iraq war is a backdrop, it’s more about the three characters…you just follow their plight, of these people doing this interesting job that just happens to be in Iraq.”
We’d have loved for Renner to have defended some of these past Iraq war films, cause some of them are actually quite good (“In The Valley of Elah,” “Stop-Loss” are all both very respectable pictures) and noted that audiences are generally stupid, cause that’s mostly the real reason as to why film goers can’t do Iraq (that and Americans would rather keep their heads in the sand when it comes to the entertainment), but that’s probably not what the Comic Con crowd would have liked to hear. “Hurt Locker” looks great though and the critics who raved at the Toronto International Film Festival seem to be on the money. You can watch the clip below. You can record audio, but not video apparently. Whatever…
