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The Hurt Locker is a 2009 American war thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The film follows a United States Army EOD team during the Iraq War in 2004. The story was written by Mark Boal, a freelance writer who was embedded with a bomb squad. It stars Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty as members of a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit in Iraq and follows their tour together as they contend with defusing bombs, the threat of insurgency, and the tension that develops between them.

The film was shot in the Middle East, specifically in Jordan, within miles of the Iraq border. It was first released theatrically in the United States on June 26, 2009 in New York and Los Angeles. Based on the success of its limited run, the independent film received a more widespread domestic theatrical release on July 24, 2009. The film had initially premiered at the Venice Film Festival in late 2008, then at the Toronto International Film Festival in North America, where it was picked up for domestic distribution by Summit Entertainment.The film has received widespread acclaim from film critics and has won numerous awards.

The Hurt Locker opens with a quote: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug". The quote comes from the 2002 best-selling book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by New York Times war correspondent and journalist, Chris Hedges.

In 2004,during the early stages of the Iraq war, Sergeant First Class William James becomes the team leader of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit with the U.S. Army's Bravo Company, replacing Staff Sergeant Thompson, who was killed by a remote-detonated improvised explosive device (IED) in Baghdad. He joins Sergeant J.T. Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge, whose jobs are to communicate with their team leader via radio inside his bombsuit, and provide him with rifle cover while he examines IEDs. During their first mission together, James's insistence on approaching a suspected IED without first sending in a bomb disposal robot leads Sanborn and Eldridge to consider him "reckless". At Camp Victory, James befriends an Iraqi boy nicknamed "Beckham" who works for a local merchant operating at the base selling bootlegged DVD's. Subsequent missions see James disarming a bomb at the United Nations building in Baghdad, the team joining forces with a British private military company in a firefight with insurgent snipers, and the team retrieving unexploded ordnance from a warehouse, all while tensions mount between the team members due to James's recklessness and unorthodox methods. During the latter mission, James discovers the dead body of a young boy who has been surgically implanted with an unexploded bomb. James believes it to be Beckham, while Sanborn and Eldridge are not certain. Nevertheless, he is emotionally damaged by seeing the boy who he believes to be Beckham become a "body bomb."



James forces the merchant for whom Beckham worked to drive him to Beckham's house. Upon entering, James encounters an Iraqi professor and demands to know who was responsible for turning Beckham into a "body bomb". The professor thinks James is a CIA agent and calmly invites him to sit down as a guest of his household. A confused James is forced out of the house by the man's wife, and he gets back into Camp Victory with the help of a sympathetic guard. That night, Eldridge is accidentally shot in the leg while the EOD team tracks down and kills two insurgents. The next morning, James is approached by Beckham, whom James coldly walks by without saying a word. Eldridge blames James for his injury, claiming James unnecessarily put his life at risk so he could have an "adrenaline fix", referring to Sanborn's suggestion that the mission, which James had ordered, would be better suited for an infantry platoon.

With only two days left on their tour, James and Sanborn are called in to assist in a situation where a man was forced to wander into a military checkpoint with a time-bomb strapped to his chest. James cannot remove the bomb nor disarm it in time, and is forced to flee before the bomb goes off. On the ride back to the base, Sanborn becomes emotional and confesses to James that he can no longer cope with the pressure of being in EOD, and relishes the prospect of finally leaving Iraq and starting a family. James returns home to his wife and child, and is seen quietly performing routine tasks of civilian life. One night he speaks to his infant son, telling him that there is only "one thing" that he knows he loves. He is next seen back in Iraq, ready to serve another year as part of an EOD team with Delta Company.