THE HURT LOCKER: Oscar tip overpraised and underwhelming

If THE HURT LOCKER walks away from the Kodak Theater in Hollywood on March 7 with the Oscar for Best Film it won't be because it really is the best film of 2009.
It'll be because the competition is so weak.

THE HURT LOCKER has nothing new to say about it's subject matter, nor does it offer an interesting spin on themes already covered elsewhere. Director Kathryn Bigelow takes "war is hell" as her starting point - in this case the war in Iraq - and proceeds to demonstrate how guerrilla warfare is even more hellish.
Her film focuses on one US Army bomb squad unit in Baghdad and follows them on their daily sorties into the city to defuse IEDs planted by insurgents in cars, under roads, strapped to unwilling suicide bombers, and even sewn into the stomach of a murdered child. 
It's suicidally dangerous work made even more deadly by the environment in which they have to operate. As James, Sanborn and Eldridge attempt to defuse these devices they can feel countless pairs of Iraqi eyes watching them from surrounding buildings. Any one of these onlookers could be holding a detonator or sniper's rifle in their hands, waiting for the moment to inflict maximum casualties.
There's no arguing that these men and - more importantly - their real-life counterparts are incredibly brave. It takes a special kind of person to walk towards a bomb, but it's difficult to develop any real empathy for the characters.
Even as I learned more about each of them as individuals I didn't find myself investing any emotion in them. Maybe I'm suffering from war movie fatigue, or maybe it's that the real battle in Iraq and Afghanistan is even more horrific than it's possible to depict on screen. A Hollywood recreation can't compete with what we can see on the tv news or read about in the newspapers even though Bigelow's cameras can get us closer to the staged action than journalists can.

THE HURT LOCKER starts out looking like a documentary (the casting of three relatively unknown actors in the lead roles contributes greatly to this impression) but then gets sidetracked into drama in it's efforts to give the main character a human face and a backstory. 
Hollywood's fixation with this docudrama approach to telling war stories almost always leaves me with a sense of disappointment. Whatever sense of reality has been created by the documentary approach to telling the story is shattered the moment it switches to drama. 
My suspended disbelief comes crashing down.
Having already won or been nominated for more than fifty awards it's a dead cert that THE HURT LOCKER, director Bigelow and lead actor Jeremy Renner will figure in the Oscar nominations on Tuesday, and there'll likely be nods for cinematography, sound and screenplay as well. 
I just hope that when the Academy members cast their votes they look beyond the subject matter and consider the film itself.