The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)

Bigelow is a Man's Woman of a director. She likes male bonding and guns. Former husband James Cameron probably felt a bit womanish in comparison. This is not to say she hasn't made decent films; a few she turned out in the '80s, primarily the vampires as burning junkies Near Dark, were near classics.
The Hurt Locker gives a bomb disposal team in Iraq going about finishing their tour of duty. It got the Oscar for best film for being about Americans in a contemporary hard situation. It's nicely shot, with decent cutaways and asides to allow for other audiences to find something too, and not as xenophobic as you might have feared. But once you take that away, there's nothing left. It's a documentary masquerading as a film, where the only trick is to kill its big name-actors as soon as they appear.

5/10