Films about the war on terror have not been high on audiences' must-see list. Yet the makers of the latest, "The Hurt Locker," hope they have the ingredients that box-office duds about Iraq and Afghanistan have lacked. Director Kathryn Bigelow and her colleagues deliver nail-biting tension and a remarkable you-are-there feeling with "The Hurt Locker," giving viewers a real sense of the lives of bomb-defusing technicians in Baghdad. They also tell a story from today's volunteer-military point of view, following troops who chose to go to war, the story stripped of US foreign-policy critiques that made such recent war films as "Rendition," "Lions for Lambs" and "In the Valley of Elah" sound preachy. "There's no hidden political agenda in this," said Jeremy Renner, who stars in "The Hurt Locker" as an ace bomb technician whose... [read full story]
