Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-12-28
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 16:9 - 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 126 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Rightly attracting major awards attention, The Hurt Locker is a supreme, tense and gripping piece of drama. And it grabs your attention from the stunning opening scene, which perfectly gets across the dangers faced by the specialist bomb disposal squad that we spend the rest of the film following.

Chief among them is Jeremy Renner’s Sergeant William James, who is the focal point for much of The Hurt Locker. The film spends some time digging into his head and why he does what he does, and his approach doesn’t always leave him eye-to-eye with the rest of his squad. Renner, in surely a star-making performance, delivers a rounded, three-dimensional portrayal of a man you could easily write off as a maverick, and the film is significantly enriched as a result.

But then with director Kathryn Bigelow behind the camera delivering her best film to date, The Hurt Locker excels still further. Her gritty, haunting visuals look superb in high definition too, evoking the down-to-earth shooting style Bigelow employs, and making the most of the assorted set-pieces she puts on film. It’s the sound that really gets you too, cleverly eating up the full breadth of a good surround-sound set-up, and carefully teasing you more and more into the film.

Not that you’re likely to need much persuading. The Hurt Locker is a terrific war movie, and a very human one. It’s also packaged on a quality Blu-ray that matches up strong presentation with interesting extra feature. It comes very highly recommended. --Jon Foster

Synopsis
Based on the personal wartime experiences of journalist Mark Boal (who adapted his experiences with a bomb squad into a fact-based, yet fictional story), director Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq War-set action thriller THE HURT LOCKER presents the conflict in the Middle East from the perspective of those who witnessed the fighting firsthand -- the soldiers. As an elite Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal team tactfully navigates the streets of present-day Iraq, they face the constant threat of death from incoming bombs and sharp-shooting snipers. In Baghdad, roadside bombs are a common danger. The Army is working to make the city a safer place for Americans and Iraqis, so when it comes to dismantling IEDs (improvised explosive devices) the Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) crew is always on their game. But protecting the public isn't easy when there's no margin of error, and every second spend dismantling a bomb is another second spent flirting with death. Now, as three fearless bomb technicians take on the most dangerous job in Baghdad, it's only a matter of time before one of them gets sent to 'the hurt locker'. Jeremy Renner, Guy Pearce, and Ralph Finnes star.

Special Features DVD: Behind the Scenes, Interviews with Cast and Crew

Customer Reviews

NOTHING MORE THAN A GLORIFIED B-MOVIE
Usually success is a combination of talent, hard work and luck. Then again, a movie like this gets the Best Picture Oscar and one can only wonder: did the members of the Academy vote FOR this movie or against James Cameron? Sure, his arrogance did not make things easy; then again, one should not underestimate envy and spite as human motivation.

Inaccuracies and obvious mistakes run rampant; the Saving Private Ryan -wannabe camera shakes you into nausea; the plot line is abandoned in the sand again and again and (what is worse) there is absolutely nothing waiting at the end. No catharsis, no message, no moral, no closure. Nothing.

Platoon marked the Vietnam war not only with its realism and its ability to paint all the shades of moral ambiguity but also because because it had the guts to send a clear political message. THE HURT LOCKER offers only a deafening silence on all these aspects. It presents this war, with some of the sacrifices and atrocities it entails, as inevitable and expected. Its message is "don't ask, we are not going to tell you why either".
And self-censorship is the worse kind of censorship. This is Hollywood at its worse.

A spineless pseudo-documentary masquerading as an art movie. A cowardly film trying to capitalize on the stories of brave men thrown into unwinnable war.

A film made by errand boys, sent by grocery clerks, to make sure the bill of blood is being paid in full. Again and again.

Pass. With extreme prejudice.

Not as good as I had hoped
Having seen all the reviews, I was looking forward to this film, but it disappointed. I felt no involvement with the characters, and felt it was more like a "documentary". By the end the overall emotion was, "so what?" which is strange as that doesn't reflect what I feel about the people who actually do this job for real.

A resounding... meh
I saw The Hurt Locker out of mild interest. I wanted to think it was a masterpiece of a war film, but honestly, its no where near as good as the critics say it is. The 'plot' is a bit to sporadic for my taste, not that i think films need to have a straight plot, but i feel that the plot of this film is to spread out, although i do like the individual assignments. I feel that most of my disappointment comes from the hype of it being highly intense when i found the scene with the suicide bomber to be the only truly intense moment. I thought that the characters weren't well formed enough or even that interesting.
Over all, there were moments that were great examples of what this film could be but in total these were to few and far between for a 2 hours and 11 minuet film such as this.
The Hurt Locker isn't terrible, its just disappointing and quite over hyped. That isn't to say you won't like, just rent it first.