This is first feature from the director Kathryn Bigelow since 2002's K-19: The Widowmaker. It begins promisingly, with a team of US Army explosives specialists detonating a roadside IED somewhere in Baghdad. They dispatch a robot to investigate the device, and then, when this surrogate breaks down, one of them goes forward himself, clad in the thick protective suit and helmet of an ice-hockey goalie, to lay the charges. Yet what makes the sequence powerful is not the fact that the bomb goes off (this is inevitable), but the accumulation of small details in its telling: the fine dust that lifts off the roof of a wrecked automobile, parked nearby, as the concussion from the blast hits. The way that, as the soldier falls forward to the ground, his visor goes red. It's a powerful opening. Thereafter, however, things decline.

Bigelow has long evinced a fascination with male enclaves and masculine codes of behaviour. France's Claire Denis feels much the same, but Bigelow, being a Hollywood film-maker, has sought to reconcile these interests with the conventions of genre: to date, she's done cyberpunk SF (Strange Days), a cop drama (Blue Steel), even a vampire flick (Near Dark).

The Hurt Locker is her war movie, and dutifully deploys every stylistic hallmark of the form: the jittery handheld camerawork, with its abrupt, recallibrating zooms and snap-pans; the bleached film stock – even the use of Courier font to signal shifts of locations and times. Yet for all this eager verisimilitude, the film never feels like anything but old-fashioned.

The clue is in the title. Its narrative is little more than a string of set-pieces, one tense incident after another, and some of these are well-handled – in particular, a long, patient shootout between snipers, at long range, in the middle of the desert. But when the tumult and the shouting dies, what we're left with is a portrait of men at war, in all their pain and bafflement. And these guys seem overly familiar, even hackneyed.

After that first specialist is killed, he's replaced by a new Staff Sergeant, William James (played by Jeremy Renner). James is an uneasy fit among his colleagues, being a wise-cracking, reckless maverick who plays strictly by his own rules – and if that sounds like a cliché, that's precisely what he is: the kind of character who exists nowhere but inside a screenwriter's head. As such, he's not merely the film's protagonist, but the literal embodiment of its broader problems: its recurring and unresolved tension between gritty reportage and shallow stereotypes.

Admittedly, the military breeds cliches, both of behaviour (character) and routine (action). That's how it functions: by subordinating individualism to conformity. But a war drama today – and this war, perhaps more than any other – requires more complexity, more ambiguity, in its telling.

In the end, what Mark Boal's script communicates best is incidental: the arrogant stupidity of an army that can't speak even a few words of the language of the people whose country they're occupying, but continue to scream orders at uncomprehending locals. "Be all you can be," urges a Colonel, a doctor, of one of the US soldiers. But how can they, knowing so little of the world and themselves? Like the men it depicts, The Hurt Locker never rises above its own limitations.

Editor's choice

• The 50 Biggest Movies of 2009
• The other side of Angelina Jolie
• Quantum of Solace