A House of Dynamite is enjoying a limited theatrical release and will soon make its Netflix premiere on October 24.
Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow's first movie in nearly a decade is a paranoid sandbox of doomsday porn featuring a talented ensemble sweating and fretting their way through a global game of nuclear chicken. For a movie mostly featuring characters prattling and panicking in enclosed government spaces, it has a swiftness of energy and a lively urgency. Ultimately though, it's feckless and aimless in its efforts to deliver unto us a new harrowing thing to intrusively keep us up at night.
When a single nuclear missile is launched at America from an unknown perpetrator, folks like a White House Situation Room Captain (Rebecca Ferguson), a Deputy National Security Advisor (Gabriel Basso), a STRATCOM General (Tracy Letts), the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris), and the current President (Idris Elba) -- and many more -- must run through every scenario of possible response while the movie layers one hypothetical nightmare on top of another.
A House of Dynamite is basically a big "what if?" crucible that keeps unspooling new Russian nesting dolls of f**kery. Okay, yes, WHAT IF this happens? There's a mysterious lone strike against the U.S. that could be an accident (or a provocation): What would we do? Well, not only does A House of Dynamite take us through that dramatized simulation, but it also adds several more layers of "gotcha" torment that feel like flat-out manipulations, since the film massively fumbles in the end zone, almost proclaiming that it merely exists to throw us all into a existential tizzy with no release one way or the other. It actually loses a whole ass point because of the finish, by the way.
Nuclear armageddon horror -- usually cinematically juiced up as a "political thriller" -- has been around since the advent of the bomb itself, from 1964's Fail Safe or Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove to Tony Scott's Crimson Tide (1995) to this year's Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning and Hulu's Paradise. The idea is that once the world starts to unravel in any serious way, everyone will launch everything everywhere, because preemptively striking is the only way to ensure a small percent of your people will survive. On an even more basic level, it's the idea that action is inherently seen as a virtue while passivity is equated with cowardice, even at the expense of all humanity. A House of Dynamite brings this up, but doesn't offer up its own resolution...or any decision, really. So not only is this well-traversed territory, but it's a half-measure compared to its peers.
Some positives here are Bigelow's direction -- which takes a claustrophobic narrative and gives it a fast pulse and humanity -- and the script's structure, which splits up the story's crucial 20-minute window of chaos and alarm into three chapters, each one showing us a different segment of the ensemble and how they're dealing with the crisis at hand. Of course, after seeing the same events play out three different ways, you can't really see it as anything other than a build up. And so the movie builds. To something big. That never happens. That's the F-minus portion of the film. It's almost as if A House of Dynamite tries to shuck its B-movie qualities -- because, at its crux, that's what it is (Bigelow and pedigreed cast aside) -- and don a sheen of Oscar bait nonsense.
Everyone's really good here, of course, with the likes of Ferguson, Elba, Harris, and Anthony Ramos carrying us through this diabolical WarGames riff. Even the characters who only exist in their job roles, and don't get that tiny smidgeon of home life to share, are terrific. They all feel full of internal life as everyone bandies about solutions to the problem of America possibly losing 10 million people without knowing who to seek revenge on. You'll even see the likes of Greta Lee, Willa Fitzgerald, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Kaitlyn Dever. All the while, the movie unwittingly reveals its scariest element, which is making us think about who's in charge right now and how all of humankind is immensely borked if anything even slightly resembling this even happens.
There are a lot of daily horrors to deal with in this country right now, so it's very understandable if some might want to avoid apocalyptic fiction, or even films that hit "too close to the bone." A House of Dynamite accidentally wanders into this terrain, but it's also too timid to go the full mile. Maybe this is how it earns its "streaming movie" badge of dishonor. There weren't too many people in the theater with me watching this, but every single one of us proclaimed "What!?" when the credits rolled.
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