by Roger Ebert

A lot of movies begin with poetic quotations, but “The Hurt Locker” opens with a statement presented as fact: “War is a drug.” Not for everyone, of course. Most combat troops want to get it over with and go home. But the hero of this film, Staff Sgt. William James, who has a terrifyingly dangerous job, addresses it like a daily pleasure. Under enemy fire in Iraq, he defuses bombs.

He isn’t an action hero, he’s a specialist, like a surgeon who focuses on one part of the body over and over, day after day, until he could continue if the lights went out. James is a man who understands bombs inside out and has an almost psychic understanding of the minds of the bombers. This is all the more remarkable because in certain scenes, it seems fairly certain that the bomb maker is standing in full view — on a balcony or in a window overlooking the street, say, and is as curious about his bomb as James is. Two professionals, working against each other.

Staff Sgt. James is played by Jeremy Renner, who immediately goes on the short list for an Oscar nomination. His performance is not built on complex speeches but on a visceral projection of who this man is and what he feels. He is not a hero in a conventional sense. He cares not for medals. He could no doubt recite patriotic reasons for his service, but does that explain why he compulsively, sometimes recklessly, puts himself in harm’s way? The man before him in this job got himself killed. James seems even cockier.

“The Hurt Locker” is a spellbinding war film by Kathryn Bigelow, a master of stories about men and women who choose to be in physical danger. She cares first about the people, then about the danger. She doesn’t leave a lot of room for much else. The man who wrote “war is a drug” was Chris Hedges, a war correspondent for the New York Times. Mark Boal, who wrote this screenplay, was embedded with a bomb squad in Baghdad. He also wrote the superb "In the Valley of Elah" (2007), with Tommy Lee Jones as a professional Army man trying to solve the murder of his son who had just returned from Iraq. Also based on fact. www.130q.com

The most important man in his life is Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), head of the support team that accompanies James. Sanborn and his men provide cover fire, scan rooftops and hiding places that might conceal snipers, and assist James into and out of his heavy protective clothing. Sanborn gives him constant audio feedback that James hears inside his helmet. It is Sanborn who has his eye on everything, who is nominally in charge, and not the tunnel-visioned James.

Sanborn is a skilled, responsible professional. He works by the book. He follows protocol. James drives him nuts. Sometimes James seems to almost deliberately invite trouble, and Sanborn believes that by following the procedure, they’ll all have a better chance of going home. He isn’t a shirker and he doesn’t have weak nerves. He’s a realist and thinks James is reckless.

Certainly James behaves recklessly at times, even in his use of protective clothing. He takes risks boldly. But in the actual task of defusing a bomb, he is as careful as if he were operating on his own heart. Bigelow uses no phony suspense-generating mechanisms in this film. No false alarms. No gung ho. It is about personalities in terrible danger. The suspense is real, and it is earned. Hitchcock said when there’s a bomb under a table, and it explodes, that’s action. When we know the bomb is there, and the people at the table play cards, and it doesn’t explode, that’s suspense.

"The Hurt Locker" is a great film, an intelligent film, a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they're doing and why. The camera work is at the service of the story. Bigelow knows that you can't build suspense with shots lasting one or two seconds. And you can't tell a story that way, either -- not one that deals with the mystery of why a man like James seems to depend on risking his life. A leading contender for Academy Awards.

Every war has certain films that capture the mindset of what it was like to be there, at least as best as we can from the sidelines. Hurt Locker valiantly attempts to be that type of film, representing the atmosphere and reality of America's current conflict in Iraq. It succeeds in detailing the haphazardness and chaos of the war but it doesn't give us any insight into its participants.

In contrast, Coppola's Apocalypse Now immersed us in the dense, murky jungles of Vietnam while Brando, Duvall and Sheen breathed life into fully realized characters. Hurt Locker's director Kathryn Bigelow certainly conveys the chaotic nature of the Iraq War, with uncertainty and danger lurking around each bend in the road in the form of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), but her characters are only two-dimensional. At the end we get a glimpse of what makes the star, William James (Jeremy Renner) tick, but it is a surface view at best.

William James is a demolitions expert. He walks into dangerous situation after dangerous situation with the look and attitude of Gary Cooper going after the bad guys in old westerns. He displays no emotions. You know that he will come out of this virtually unscathed, at least physically. Since he has top billing this comes as no surprise. Displaying human emotion is left to his two partners, JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). Sanborn is in constant conflict with James. Eldridge is scared but manages to perform under the pressure of it all.

There is no real plot in Hurt Locker -- just endless mayhem continuing day after day, scene after scene -- probably as fair a representation of war as one could hope to see, I suppose.  But it leaves the audience exhausted. We wait for character development and the only one we are given is what feels like an obligatory interaction between the troubled Eldridge and his psychiatrist. It doesn't work all that well, falling well short of the catharsis we need after all this pain and suffering.

Despite my complaints, Hurt Locker remains a film worth seeing: professionally made and well-paced.  But it plays much more like an action genre outing than a classic war picture, which seems a shame because it could have been truly special had it taken the time to let us get to know our characters instead of constantly throwing them into the fray. It is probably far too soon to give us THE Iraq War film so let's just look at Hurt Locker at the first one that gave it an earnest try, falling just slightly short of its target.