Rant-Spoilers.

Rating: 5/10 (12 February 2009)

Spoilers.
I was really exited to hear that Bigelow was making an EOD movie with Renner, Pierce, and Fiennes. I was sold before I even saw anything.
Problems.
Most of the good scenes and lines are all shown in the trailer, so if you haven't seen the trailer, don't watch it.
Fiennes and Pearce are not really in the movie. Neither is Morse. They play their roles very well, but they're really brief cameos.
Brian Geraghty, who played a retard-geek in Jarhead and The Guardian, did it again in this movie (stop it already).
It is more than 2 hours long when it didn't have to be.
The editing was messy and the audience has to often see a lot of unnecessary pauses, horseplay, and dialogue (like a character asking a question, we wait 30 seconds, then it cuts to another scene where it was never answered. Or we see them drinking and hitting each other for 10 minutes).
It also gets confusing when the three man team starts doing infantry type missions at the whim of it's leader, when they don't have to.
The chain of command was non-existent as Renner could go and do whatever he wanted and he never had to answer to anyone in either the EOD chain or in the chain that he was attached to.
I was hoping for Renner to either admit why he wanted to die, or for him to... simply die. Instead, he goes home and tells horror stories, and then redeploys by the time the credits are rolling (Mark Boal, stop writing movies).
The movie set out to "show what soldiers go through", but there's serious problems with this idea alone.
You can't "know" what all soldiers go through. There's too many different jobs, experiences, and personal beliefs that are told in any first hand accounts.
I don't think that anyone would consider EOD as a normal job, and is already far away from the traditional soldiering role, but then they force in unnecessary fire fights and sobbing confessions to make it look more like a 'war film'.
Nearly every scene won't make any sense to anyone that knows a little bit about the military. (Sniper scene, back alley scene, dismantling live bombs when they didn't have to, the whole Ranger EOD thing that I've at least never ever heard of, etc)
Boal keeps writing in this very depressing atmosphere that he used in his other film. But while that was based on a real-life tragedy, this was not.
I believe that this movie could have been an awesome classic as it had a very GREAT director and actors in it (except for JarJar), but was brought down with a low budget and an idiot screenwriter.