Action films have become increasingly formulaic: some flirtatious dialogue here; a deafening barrage of bullets there; throw in the moment when the best friend gets slain (and inspires vengeance in the hero), and you're pretty much covered.

Now along comes director Kathryn Bigelow, swaggering and swinging for the fences after a seven-year absence from the biz. Her last film, K-19: The Widowmaker, was overly long, melodramatic but ambitious. (It takes courage to ask Harrison Ford to fake a Russian accent.) She returns this time with The Hurt Locker, a madly suspenseful war story that's action to the core.

Bigelow focuses on a U.S. Army unit staffed by three men with the most fatalistic of tasks: defusing bombs in Iraq. The film opens with a scene of the trio disarming an explosive. When it suddenly goes off, the staff sergeant's protective helmet is splattered with red. The guy we thought was a main character (Guy Pearce) is dead within five minutes. From the outset, Bigelow has made it clear: No one has a pass in Baghdad.

Shortly thereafter, Intelligence Lt. J.T (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) find themselves under the supervision of Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), a fiendish adrenaline junkie and, as another soldier puts it, a "hot s--t" defuser. They encounter situations of escalating gravity: a stand-off with a pair of lethal sharpshooters, a search-and-rescue for a kidnapped soldier and, most harrowing, the disarming of a bomb placed inside the corpse of a boy with whom William may have been friends.

While you'd expect the big names (Pearce, and later, a superb Ralph Fiennes) to get the big parts, here they're mere casualties or minor figures. Instead, new stars emerge: Renner gives a savage performance that encapsulates the moral decay and emotional instability that can come with being a soldier in the thick of it. Equally noteworthy is Mackie, whose J.T. radiates intelligence.

Though it hews to the war film genre in some ways, Bigelow avoids big shootouts and instead opts for scenes of gripping tension; the glory of survival is eclipsed by the psychological toll of the battlefield. Having said that, The Hurt Locker does have a debt to Terrence Malick's sublime The Thin Red Line. Yet whereas Malick's film emphasized a unit's sense of brotherhood, Bigelow stresses the singularity of experience. It's every man for himself. The army has no outfit or plan besides bedlam. In modern warfare, chaos reigns supreme.



That's a whole lotta hurt.