Resolutely simplistic, seemingly complex, Hurt Locker bears the mark of all mediocre films, most of its tensions disappear on second viewing, some of them dissolve even during their first. Its logic messy and unconvincing, Bigelow has many choices but seems to milk any distortion she can while sacrificing intelligent sequencing. Early on a butcher detonates an IED after the targeted technician has come closest to the killzone, he's already on his way out when it detonates, the purpose here is to array the tensions in layers yet it destroys the pure logic of the bomb's purpose. Bigelow couches everything, it's her first pop-out, the butcher holds his cellphone-bomb-remote artificially and in plain sight, needlessly calling attention from the support troops. Meetings between unknowns are milked for every second of tension possible, 'you guys are wired tight' is the understatement of the film, James' taxi encounter seems to go on for years, the initial seconds of the encounter with mercenary Brits are elongated like a blind date intro.  'Improvs' like the use of a smoke flare to reduce visibility on a tight street are met with hysteria from Sanborn, the film seems to create drama out of operatic fear. You'd wonder if the bomb unit had any sense of cool. The support team loses its lunch at every possible turn, grating audience nerves needlessly, and surely Iraq vets in the audience leave the film rolling eyes: who are these whiners?  Without the perceptive distortions we share with Renner's central character, all cheap gotchas that usually are tools of the horror film, the film is merely a stylized, largely static war drama with a component fate: the tension of defusing catastrophic bombs. Interspersed between the wooden Green Zone/base therapy-'letting steam-off' scenery is the paranoia of cultural confusion and divided languages. The technical nightmares of urban warfare in a city only temporarily conquered are never fully realized though: the plot has to depart the city to duel with ultra-long lenses where its one Iraq-conflict-signature-jarhead-moment, the sniper exchange and outcome, falls this side of flat. She can't decide if the film is a document of what seems real or is it all too surreal?  For all the supposed technical charms of Bigelow's macho bravo eye, it still feels more transvestite than transcendant. Moments like the boy's reappearance and the confused home invasion have contrivances that weigh sentimental rather than paint the film with radical shifts in wartime paradox. Generals, medics, buddies, even cameos like Fiennes and Pearce are modulated into a gruff anyspeak.  Its mediocrity rises full pitch as the film ends with his child's jack-in-the-box routine, a metaphor so leaden, Bigelow may as well be saying: do you get it? The way she displays data is glaring, his box of denatured devices, what is being left in the transitions, nothing. Fear? Do we really obtain a sense of the streets?  Culture is still awaiting this war's watershed flick: the Deer Hunter-Apocalypse Now-Full Metal Jacket lens. Where plot is only a decoy to obtain the visual epic.