The Hurt Locker film of 2009, behind Pixar's "Up". The critics' consensus reads, "A well-acted, intensely shot, action filled war epic, Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is thus far the best of the recent dramatizations of the Iraq War." Metacritic, which assigns a normalized score, gave the film an average score of 94 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".<ref name="meta"> The Hurt Locker The Hurt Locker is a 2008 American war thriller film directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal released on June 26, 2009. It stars Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Christian Camargo, Ralph Fiennes,
The Hurt Locker the Humvee, into a boots-on-the-ground experience." 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." Renner's character, Sergeant First Class William James, is a composite character, with qualities based on individuals whom screenwriter Boal knew when embedded with the bomb squad. Bigelow cast Renner based on his work in "Dahmer", a film about Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious serial killer whose victims were boys. To prepare for the film, Renner spent a week living and training at Fort Irwin, a U.S.