Film releases: To hell with a hothead hero

War is hell, the movies tell us. But what kind of hell? And are there people who prefer hell as a working environment – all that heat, all that adrenalising anxiety, the daily danger of IPDs (improvised pitchfork devices) – to boring old, placid old heaven?

The Hurt Locker ★★★★☆
Kathryn Bigelow

Broken Embraces ★★★★☆
Pedro Almodóvar

Funny People ★★☆☆☆
Judd Apatow

Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1 ★★★☆☆
Jean-François Richet

The Final Destination 3D ★★★☆☆
David R. Ellis

Maybe it takes a woman director to say it: to suggest that machismo can be a disease and the love of danger or violence a form of addiction. The release of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker was delayed for a year by a studio fearing it would bomb commercially, like other recent Iraq movies.

The studio must have feared a “bomb” in other senses: one that would go off in US filmgoers’ faces, outraging them with the notion that war is sometimes fought not by trepidatious hero-martyrs but by gung-ho hotheads – borderline-psychopathic – like Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner, pictured above). He is the new man, replacing his predecessor (Guy Pearce, blown up in scene one) in a bomb-disposal team waiting out its last weeks of Iraq rotation.

Every day is a new invitation to die. With structural daring, Bigelow (who made Point Break and Strange Days) and screenwriter Mark Boal (a former embedded Iraq reporter who co-wrote In the Valley of Elah) place two extended, nerve-racking bomb-defusal sequences in succession right at the beginning. Take a spare set of fingernails. By the time the characters – Renner and his two fellow sappers (Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty), increasingly alarmed by the newcomer’s lack of risk-aversion – sit back for a moment’s interaction at base camp, the film’s theme is already announced in its unspoken action. It takes disturbed people to excel at that disturbed activity called war.

Subplots scurry into position, cleverly hand-signalled into place like soldiers setting up an ambush or assault. There is a heartbreaking episode with a soccer-mad Iraqi youngster, nicknamed “Beckham”, who falls foul of terrorists seeking to make a human bomb. There is the brief but compelling moment when Mackie and Geraghty contemplate killing Renner.

Less persuasively, there is Ralph Fiennes leading a lost squad, dug into a last stand in the desert, who seem to have wandered in from The Four Feathers.

Finally, though, the film sweats out its truth from its central character. Renner, plump-cheeked, affectless, imperturbable, quietly manic, resembles a young Rod Steiger. This kind of soldier could either win a war or destroy an army (his own). Like all entities fashioned principally or initially for war, human or mineral (nuclear bomb), an energy useful in conflict is dangerous or unstable in peacetime – a telling coda shows Renner not settling down on his return home – and even, if carelessly handled, in war. Heroes? Leaders? Victors? They may just be other words for hotheads, power-maniacs and those who think a war won can ever be a war forgotten.

Clandestine passion: Penélope Cruz

Can Pedro Almodóvar make a bad film? The answer seems to be no, even when he might be accused of trying. Broken Embraces has a mazy plot in which a poor director would lose himself fast, failing to bring into equal and simultaneous focus the aspiring actress turned victim of doomed passion (Penélope Cruz), her blind film-director lover (Lluís Homar), her jealous businessman sugar-daddy, the director’s ex-mistress – all sporting their emotional wounds like Christly stigmata – and several hunky Tom Cobbleys, gay and straight, without whom no AC/DC melodrama by this Spaniard would be complete.

In sets that deserve their own tie-in art exhibition – Almodóvar must be the most inventive colourist in film history – the emotional tempests play out. So do the intermeshing time zones as the story tos and fros between years and decades, illustrating how in the world of clandestine passion the best-planned lays of men and women gang aft agley.

There are astonishing visual moments: a woman’s fleeting look of unassuageable yearning at an ex-lover on a windswept beach, a midnight car crash lit by the macabre glow from a giant floodlit metal statue. The soundtrack is no less marvellous, natural sounds allowed their say between the instrumental surges of composer Alberto Iglesias, whose scores for this filmmaker are becoming worthy of Bernard Herrmann’s for Hitchcock. Second-best Almodóvar? It still beats the best of most European contemporaries.

The Hollywood writer-director Judd Apatow, so soon after being hailed as the new kid on the comedy block (The 40-year-old Virgin, Knocked Up), is now the new head on the chopping block. Reviewers have sensed that moment when a career, restless for change, decides to follow the sign saying “Doom and destruction this way”.

Laughter and tears: ‘Funny People’

For some, success at making people laugh is never enough. They are clowns who want to star in or direct Pagliacci. With Apatow’s Funny People the “funny” is ironic and the “people” are Adam Sandler, a stand-up comedian who learns that he has a fatal disease, and emotionally dysfunctional Seth Rogen, who can’t get girls but does get a job as gag-writer and Man Friday with the womanising, selfish, but now leukaemia-diagnosed mirth-millionaire.

Everyone gets to cry during the film. The spectacle is worse in High Definition, even when photographed by Janusz Schindler’s List Kaminski. Blobby pink eyes, blobby pink faces. Some jokes are good. Others die like victims of Procrustes, stretched on the 145-minute running time. Rogen has lost weight – another guest of Procrustes? – which takes away all or some of his comic cuddliness. Sandler has gained dramatic weight and variety. But if I want to see him play Hamlet, I’d rather have Shakespeare as the scriptwriter.

Grandstanding: Vincent Cassel

Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1 completes the screen diptych portraying the life of the French master-crook Jacques Mesrine. With this sequel, the director Jean-François Richet has both too much time and too little. There is too much repetition of the first film’s tropes: from Mesrine’s obsessive-compulsive bank-robbing complete with withdrawal interludes – “The banks were closed, so I figured I’d visit my father” – to supporting characters thrown into the hero’s orbit like mice into a snake’s cage. Matthieu Amalric, a jail lag turned co-larcenist, lasts longest. But even his mouse seems drained of red blood cells simply by being placed next to Vincent Cassel’s grandstanding Mesrine.

Cassel gorges himself on the character’s hot-blooded, hot-headed egotism. But his brio is unfairly advantaged in the race for our sympathy by the designer dorkiness of the “good” characters, including Olivier Gourmet’s plodding, Amish-bearded detective. All the world loves an outlaw. But how cheaply is that love won if all his partners and opponents have been drafted in from Dullsville-sur-Seine?

I recommend The Final Destination 3D to everyone feeling cold-turkeyed by Hollywood’s determination to make its new stereoscopy cycle more restrained and tasteful than the old ones – more depth-of-field, less in-your-face. Almost everything in this third sequel in the violent-death franchise flies out and hits you in the eye: blood, body parts, sharp instruments, entire spinning motor cars... You never saw so much ducking and weaving, or heard such gasps of happy horror, outside a funfair.