The only reason people should watch this film is for a lesson in everything NOT to do if you want to be a US Soldier. This movie only further widens the divide between civilian and veteran, because this is not the kind of film anyone should glorify as a primer on the rigors of war or the minds of those that serve. There are key things you need to understand:

1. Renner's character is a horrible soldier. Everything he does constantly endangers the lives of those around him just so he can show off. If you want to be self-destructive in wartime, fine, but if you endanger your boys in the process you are the worst kind of soldier. Nobody would ever want to work with him, and he probably would have been busted down to a private and put in a supporting position far away from any live explosives.

2. Every intense scenario in this film is made perilous for no reason. There would be a circle of machine guns around suspected IEDs to prevent exactly the kind of stupidity that takes place in this film. The dangers are only featured in the film because the writers had no idea how to create realistic tension.

3. Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever kicks, pulls, or drags suspected IEDs because you have no idea what kind of triggers might have been put on them, or how many there might be. You wouldn't waste your time and life needlessly disarming a random carbomb in an abandoned courtyard either. Just blow it up. Seriously, it's already in a self-contained area that wont endanger people.

If you've never served, those may seem like small issues, but those three grossly erroneous flaws make up the entire movie. Whoever wrote this created a fantasy, not a realistic depiction of how EOD operate or war actually worked in the middle east.

I don't fault the actors, they did good with the scripts they were given and probably had no idea how dumb the writing was, but vets hate this movie.