Verdict: Certainly the best picture about ordinance disposal, ever.
Finally, we get to see Oscar's little miracle. It's the movie that went out in the US last year with much acclaim but was largely ignored by American audiences who haven't warmed to Iraq War films.
Its stateside performance meant it slipped off the release slate in this part of the world. Until, that is, the Academy took a shine to it and gave The Hurt Locker six Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director to Bigelow.
She's the first woman to win the accolade and it tops a career which has delivered some memorable genre exercises (vampires in Near Dark, sci-fi in Strange Days) but has mainly been marked by blokes with over-developed adrenal glands (Point Break) or ones trying to survive under unbelievable pressure (K-19: The Widowmaker).
And so it is here, with The Hurt Locker offering a yes, explosive mix of bomb disposal thrills and psychological portraits.
It might be set in 2004 Baghdad but unlike its post-occupation cinematic competition, Green Zone, it says virtually nothing about the wider context of the invasion. Instead, it just concentrates on being a gripping and gruesome account of the bomb squad's final tour of duty.
Fair enough too. When you are cutting the red or the blue wire - or trying to assess whether a surrendering suicide bomber has really had a change of heart - any nagging questions about why you are there in the first place might go to the back of your mind.
It also lets the movie off the hook in a way. The bomb squad's there to save everybody from insurgent explosives which grants them an unimpeachable heroism.
Making those kind of life and death calculations is the job of Staff Sgt William James (Renner). He's the new team leader to Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Geraghty), who have just lost their old boss. But James isn't as much interested in leadership as defusing IEDs (improvised explosive devices) with reckless abandon, which is sure to get them all killed.
And thus the film lights its own fuse: is James himself a bigger ticking timebomb than the crude devices he has to deal with? Will his apparent addiction to the rush of knowing he could die with the next snip of his pliers be his undoing?
It's an unnerving experience to be in his company. But there are times when the script by Mark Boal, formerly an embedded journalist with a US Army bomb squad, unfortunately abandons its otherwise clear-eyed approach to its mission and faux-doco realism, like when James befriends an Iraqi boy which leads into something both credulity-stretching and rare - uncalculated risk.
Much of its screentime is spent on hand-held shots of a guy in protective gear walking slowly down dusty streets. But as a pure action film, The Hurt Locker still has plenty to make you duck. Especially in a firefight when the team encounters a squad of mercenaries led by Ralph Fiennes doing his best Lawrence of Arabia, in which Bigelow shows she sure knows how to choreograph a range war and drop you into the thick of it.
But it's The Hurt Locker's spellbinding sense of tension-and-release and its uniformly engaging performances that are the making of it. They don't render it flawless, but they sure make it's an Iraq War movie you don't have to dislike the Iraq War to like. Russell Baillie
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Gregarty Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Rating: R16 (violence, offensive language & content that may disturb)
Running time: 131 mins
