A new generation of soldiers

In reviews for "The Hurt Locker," you see critics going out of their way to declare that it's not like those other movies about the war in Iraq.

The ones you didn't want to see - "Stop-Loss," "In the Valley of Elah," "Grace is Gone," et al.

Heck, they say, it's not an Iraq movie at all. Just a war movie that happens to be set in Iraq.

They mean well. They want to bring a wary audience to a movie they like and admire. One that's not political, one that's even entertaining in its own hair-raising way.

But "The Hurt Locker" is exceptional because it's the Iraq-est of the Iraq war movies to date. It touches on what is unique about this particular conflict - that it's fought, to a noteworthy extent, by volunteer men and women who want to be there, who re-enlist (sometimes missing an arm or leg) to be with their "warrior buddies."

Most of our modern war movies have a common element, one that links material as different as "Saving Private Ryan" and "Platoon." It's the idea of the citizen soldier, the Ordinary Joe who's plucked via conscription from his civilian life and dumped on the front lines, where he endures with the thought of returning to his workaday life.

The volunteer army and the long-running Iraq conflict has produced another kind of soldier. One who goes to the front lines and finds a home, a sense of purpose and meaning missing in civilian life.

We meet him in "The Hurt Locker."

He's Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialist Sgt. James, played in what is probably a career-making performance by Jeremy Renner.

James has an uncanny proficiency, a gift, for defusing live bombs. And something else - a desire to do it, one that begets a fearlessness that frightens his colleagues (who work within the blast radius) because it seems to depart from prudence.

Director Kathyrn Bigelow has a pulp-action background ("Near Dark," "Point Break") and she makes the movie's many bomb-defusing sequences exciting. Early scenes establish the missions as deadly beyond question, and subsequent defusings have a remarkable tension.

You can't make a thought-provoking war movie unless you bring the war to life, and Bigelow uses her visual chops to do just that. The movie's poster references the best scene - James defuses a shell, breaths a sigh of relief, then pulls up a connecting wire to reveal a spider-web of wired shells all around. You realize his work's just begun.

A metaphor for the Iraq war itself? I don't know. But I know a brilliant sequence when I see one.

For good measure, she throws in a desert ambush sequence (Ralph Fiennes in a short-lived cameo) just to show off (long-range snipering looks really cool on screen).

These diversions are mostly well-judged, though I think the movie goes a little bonkers as James and company go off the reservation for a personal mission of retribution in the late going.

And screenwriter Mark Boal has a weakness for taking what should be subtext about Sgt. James' character traits and blurting it out as dialogue.

You and your adrenaline highs!

Shades of "Point Break."

The movie is glib in comparing James' combat rush to addiction. And it certainly doesn't see James in simple terms as a clean-cut hero. His cowboyism is dangerous, and his colleagues (Anthony Mackie) resent it.

Still, through Renner's lived-in performance, you find James a sympathetic figure, a guy who discovers amid the chaos of war that he has a unique skill set that makes him amazingly useful and vitally important.

Beats workin' at Home Depot.

And there's some awfully good stuff in here. It's the first Iraq movie (shot in Jordan, with Iraqi actors) to have a vivid sense of place, both in geographic and live-ammo sense. And it's the first drama to get remotely close to explaining why so many men and women re-enlist.

Certainly there has been de-facto conscription in the war, and there are those who've served with both distinction and reluctance. "Stop-Loss" and the rest had valid points to make, but they all seemed to make the same point.

"The Hurt Locker" shows there's more than one kind of solder fighting the war, more than one kind of story to tell.