It stars Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Christian Camargo, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Guy Pearce.

The film follows an Iraq War Explosive Ordnance Disposal team who are targeted by insurgents and shows their psychological reactions to the stress of combat.

During a raid on a warehouse, James discovers a "body bomb" he believes is Beckham, an Iraqi boy who sells DVDs and plays soccer outside of base.

Sanborn is distraught at the near-death experience, and lamenting that no one other than his parents would have been sad at his death, tells James that he wishes to leave the service in order to have a son.

The Hurt Locker is based on accounts of Mark Boal, a freelance journalist who was embedded with an American bomb squad in the war in Iraq for two weeks in 2004.

[2] While working with Boal in 2005 on the script, originally titled The Something Jacket, Bigelow began to do some preliminary, rough storyboards to get an idea of the specific location needed.

[2] For the main characters, Bigelow made a point of casting relatively unknown actors: "it underscored the tension because with the lack of familiarity also comes a sense of unpredictability.

[13] To prepare for the film, the cast spent a week living and training at Fort Irwin, a United States Army reservation in the Mojave Desert in California.

Boal's contacts in the Central Intelligence Agency suggested Jordan because its capital city of Amman strongly resembled Baghdad and because the Jordanian royal family was very supportive of Western film productions.

As Iraq dominated discourse in America and around the world, Bigelow believed that filmmakers would continue to explore the conflict, making Jordan the natural place to film.

He found he had to stay up all night to make proper ammunition for a sniper rifle, as the supplies did not clear Jordanian customs in time for the scheduled shoot.

"[23] In staging the film's action sequences, Bigelow did not want to lose a sense of the geography and used multiple cameras to allow her to "look at any particular set-piece from every possible perspective.

After the Super 16mm film was transferred to DVcam at a lab in London, the video dailies were transported by plane back to the Middle East to be imported into the editing system.

"[24][25] Producer Tony Mark later negotiated the use of a local radio station late at night to receive low-grade QuickTime clips over the Internet so the crew would not be shooting blindly.

Ebert considered Renner "a leading contender for Academy Awards", writing, "His performance is not built on complex speeches but on a visceral projection of who this man is and what he feels.

The movie is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise.

He also applauded the convergence of the characters in the film, saying that it "focuses on three men whose contrasting temperaments knit this episodic exploration of peril and bravery into a coherent and satisfying story.

"[60] Westwell praised the director's skill: "The careful mapping of the subtle differences between each bomb, the play with point of view ... and the attenuation of key action sequences ... lends the film a distinctive quality that can only be attributed to Bigelow's clever, confident direction.

"[60]Amy Taubin of Film Comment described The Hurt Locker as "a structuralist war movie" and "a totally immersive, off-the-charts high-anxiety experience from beginning to end."

"[61] Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal called it "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.

"[64] Derek Elley of Variety found The Hurt Locker to be "gripping" as a thriller but felt that the film was weakened by, "its fuzzy (and hardly original) psychology."

"[65] Anne Thompson, also writing for Variety, believed The Hurt Locker to be a contender for Best Picture, particularly based on the unique subject matter pursued by a female director and on being an exception to other films about the Iraq War, which had performed poorly.

And in this way, the full impact of the Iraq war—at least as it was fought in 2004—becomes clear: American soldiers shot at Iraqi civilians even when, for example, they just happened to be holding a cell phone and standing near an IED."

She concludes, "For all the graphic violence, bloody explosions and, literally, human butchery that is shown in the film, The Hurt Locker is one of the most effective recruiting vehicles for the U.S. Army that I have seen.

"[67]John Pilger, journalist and documentarian, criticized the film in the New Statesman, writing that it "offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else's country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion.

[72] Author Brandon Friedman, also a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, shared a similar view at VetVoice: "The Hurt Locker is a high-tension, well-made, action movie that will certainly keep most viewers on the edges of their seats.

"[74] Troy Steward, another combat veteran, wrote on the blog Bouhammer that while the film accurately depicted the scale of bomb violence and the relations between Iraqis and troops, "just about everything else wasn't realistic."

"[77] Former British bomb disposal officer Guy Marot said, "James makes us look like hot-headed, irrational adrenaline junkies with no self-discipline.

[94] Jody Simon, a Los Angeles-based entertainment lawyer, noted that "soldiers don't have privacy," and that when the military embedded Boal, they gave him full permission to use his observations as he saw fit.

[95] On May 12, 2010, Voltage Pictures, the production company behind The Hurt Locker, announced that it would attempt to sue "potentially tens of thousands" of online computer users who downloaded unlicensed copies of the film using the BitTorrent and P2P networks.