The Hurt Locker: Critic Reviews

An intense, action-driven war pic, a muscular, efficient standout that 
 simultaneously conveys the feeling of combat from within as well as what it looks like on the ground.

If The Hurt Locker is not the best action movie of the summer, I'll blow up my car.

A blazingly powerful action movie... whose unpretentious clarity makes for a refreshing change.

Finally, Hollywood has made a great film about the Iraq War.

The Hurt Locker is about Iraq in the same way that Paths of Glory was about World War I or Full Metal Jacket was about Vietnam -- which is to say, utterly and not at all. The Hurt Locker is a great movie, period.

Screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow have made a unique film about war.

Instead of setting out to prove a point, it seeks to immerse us in an environment -- something Bigelow does with a conceptual rigor usually associated with those directors whose work is confined to film societies and art houses.

A movie that deserves to stand as one of the defining films of the decade.

A first-rate action thriller, a vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq, a penetrating study of heroism and a showcase for austere technique, terse writing and a trio of brilliant performances.

The miserably visceral exists here not as exploitation but out of the demands of authenticity.

... a super-smart actioner about men in war that's arguably the best American film of the year.

The Hurt Locker might be the first Iraq-set film to break through to a mass audience because it doesn't lead with the paralysis of the guilt-ridden Yank. The horror is there, but under the rush.

The Hurt Locker is a small classic of tension, bravery, and fear, which will be studied twenty years from now when people want to understand something of what happened to American soldiers in Iraq.

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.

[Kathryn] Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal...have made the first fictional feature about American soldiers in Iraq that doesn't fall apart, or preach to a choir, or turn into a position paper.

It's the best war movie since Full Metal Jacket.

Like all the best war movies -- no matter what war, what era -- The Hurt Locker goes to the core of human nature.

Psychologically acute and thrillingly dramatic, The Hurt Locker blows every other Iraq war movie off the screen.

The question isn't how do you live with the buzz of looming death; it's how do you live without it? No answers are offered, or even suggested.

Bigelow's direction is confident -- the action sequences are tense and suspenseful, so much so that The Hurt Locker also works as a straight-up war film.

Often gripping at a straight thriller level, but increasingly weakened by its fuzzy psychology, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker doesn't bring anything new to the table of grunts-in-the-firing-line movies.

Despite its pumped-up admiration for our troops and some scenes that spurt adrenaline like a fire hose, this sort-of-thriller about a bomb squad working in 2004 is stretched both timewise and for plausibility.

This beyond-the-headlines war movie, a 'ticking clock' thriller from journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, is the first Iraq War movie to qualify as more first-rate entertainment than sermon.

Just when you thought the battle of Iraq war dramas had been fought and lost, along comes one that demands to be seen -- if you can handle the raging adrenaline.

Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd crank up the tension to nail-biting, gut-churning extremes and the mayhem is powerfully visceral.