First and foremost, if you want escapism in your movies, this one ain’t for you. Right now, there’s a war going on in Iraq with thousands of soldiers in harm’s way, and you’d better steer clear of the theater if you want to forget that for two and a half hours (To its credit, though, the movie is absolutely and 100 percent apolitical).

However, this movie does have one thing that is seldom found in modern escapist action movies: suspense. In this movie (and in real-life Iraq and Afghanistan, for that matter), any schmuck with a cell phone could set off a bomb at any time. Anyone with a vest or a jacket could blow up without warning. And no matter how many snipers are taken down, there’s always the risk that one is still left. Oh, and the culture gap — even with a translator — can be fatal.

The narrative does drag in spots, though. There was a brief subplot, for example, where our protagonist sets out to find who was responsible for turning an Iraqi boy into a bomb (yes, you read that right). While I can understand the frustration he has, his scenes with the boy were wonderful and the investigation was relatively brief, I still feel like the pacing could have been improved with minimal damage to the narrative if those scenes had been cut. Also, there’s a point where the squadron is called in to investigate a bomb scene in the Green Zone. This is followed by horrific imagery that, while warranted, went for about a minute too long without advancing the story. I also think that the time between the climax (an especially nightmarish suicide vest scenario) and the final cut to black could have and should have been tighter.

Still, I’ll take suspense and raw emotion over masturbatory CGI any day. While this film is not for everyone, I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to see how a true filmmaker gets an audience to care and question whether or not a fictional character lives or dies.