A House of Dynamite
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Written by Noah Oppenheim
Starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Gabriel Basso
Classification N/A; 112 minutes
Streaming on Netflix starting Oct. 24
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Hamilton alum Anthony Ramos as Major Daniel Gonzalez in Netflix’ A House of Dynamite.Eros Hoagland/Netflix/Supplied
What would you do if the world was ending in 19 minutes? May I strongly suggest that you not spend those few remaining moments – or really any amount of your time, impending apocalypse or not – watching A House of Dynamite, a tremendously frustrating exercise in bait-and-switch white-knuckleism that is all the more disappointing coming from Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Strange Days).
Fashioned as a kind of semi-sequel to Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, her previous exploration into the dangerous rabbit holes of D.C. bureaucracy (but this time robbed of any shred of intellectual or emotional honesty), A House of Dynamite finds Bigelow tracing the final moments of a nuclear disaster with the ambitions and artistry of a particularly sadistic and rather unimaginative child.
It is clear that Bigelow and her screenwriter, Noah Oppenheim realize that they have locked themselves into a panic room with no escape early in the film, when the camera briefly lingers on a shot of the infamous 2011 Situation Room photo that captured White House officials – including then-president Barack Obama and secretary of state Hillary Clinton – watching a monitor as the killing of Osama bin Laden was confirmed.
That photograph, a key totem of Zero Dark Thirty, posits that the leaders of the U.S. government are both in control of any given situation, but, hey, they’re also just people like us who can be shocked and awed. It’s a too-easy sentiment that carries over into A House of Dynamite, albeit scrawled in crayon.
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Tracy Letts and Gbenga Akinnagbe join A House of Dynamite cast members Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Gabriel Basso.Eros Hoagland/Netflix/Supplied
The film opens as U.S. officials wake up one morning to discover that an intercontinental ballistic missile has been launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean – by who or what geopolitical power is unclear – and will hit Chicago in less than half an hour. Can the U.S. shoot it down? And, if not, will the White House retaliate? And if so, against whom?
These high-anxiety questions drive the first third of the film, which is incredibly effective in its ability to manufacture teeth-gritting terror, especially as it focuses on the film’s most fully sketched character, Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), a senior officer in the White House’s Situation Room.
But just as Bigelow and Oppenheim inch toward providing some essential answers, they maddeningly rewind the timeline to show the same events from the perspective of a national security advisor (Gabriel Basso). And then again from the viewpoint of the commander-in-chief (Idris Elba) and his secretary of defence (Jared Harris). In between, the film cuts to various underlings (including, most memorably, Tracy Letts as a straight-talking general) as they flit in and out of the triumvirate of POVs, each striving to fulfill the film’s fantasy of capable-but-relatable government officials.
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The ostensibly profound and provocative connections that Bigelow and Oppenheim think that they are making by threading one version of events to the others in fact results in a disastrous untangling of narrative and character. It all leads to an ending that is at once a middle finger and a slap to the face. (It is also deeply, darkly funny that the film’s powerhouse cast is largely made up of non-Americans. Even in Hollywood’s wildest Oval Office imagination, a Brit is POTUS and his most competent military liaison is a Swede.)
A House of Dynamite doesn’t so much self-destruct as fail to even ignite a spark. By the time that the “big moment” arrives, particularly paranoid audiences will not be able to escape the radioactive shadow of Fail Safe, the 1964 Cold War thriller from Sidney Lumet. That film had more courage and temerity in its final few seconds than Bigelow and Oppenheim can muster across 112 cringe-filled minutes. Let’s band together as a planet and nuke this one from orbit.
