9. The Hurt Locker (2008)
Expectation: A torture-porn derivative wherein a serial killer forces his victims to wear a lethal contraption remarkably similar to the Jaw Splitter in
Saw? A school-based horror in which bullied students exact bloody revenge? A drama about a group of strangers trapped in a lift, who discover that their seemingly-disparate lives are in fact interlinked; directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu?
Reality: Kathryn Bigelow's nerve-shredding thriller about a three-man bomb disposal team during the Iraq war took its name from a military expression meaning 'physical or emotional pain'. Jeremy Renner plays Sergeant William James, a man whose bravado is misinterpreted as arrogance. Rather than send a camera-mounted 'autobot' to potential detonations, he prefers to approach the site himself, and not always in full protective gear. As a war film, not to mention a study of American masculinity (now cemented as a Bigelow characteristic), it's up there with
Full Metal Jacket. Slowly picking a wire out from the sand, ever watching for the slightest of twitches, has given cinema its greatest rush of Russian Roulette since
The Deer Hunter.