‘A House of Dynamite’ Review – Slick Political Thriller Becomes A Self-Defeating Spiral

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is built on a great idea, rippling with urgency and tension. Out of nowhere, an ICBM is launched at the United States. Nobody in any echelon of the expansive government and military apparatus knows where it came from. But in 20 minutes or so, it’ll hit Chicago, causing countless deaths and untold carnage. DEFCON 2 is initiated, and then quickly DEFCON 1, as various key personnel attempt to figure out where the missile is coming from, who launched it, and how to respond. It’s immediate, intriguing, and exciting. And then it starts again.

The fact that the movie runs for just under two hours and not twenty minutes is your first clue that this premise can’t sustain a feature film on its own. Instead, a gimmick is deployed. Right before impact, the movie wheels back in time and shows the crisis again, from the perspective of a new clutch of characters. The stars glimpsed on video screens in the previous telling become fully-fledged point-of-view characters in the next. Each redo – there are three in total – provides new context and theories for what might be going on and who might be responsible. But despite the changes in viewpoint, the movie’s perspective never shifts. It’s a snapshot of political calamity built around a ticking clock that keeps resetting.

This kind of thing is characteristic of Noah Oppenheim – I can’t tell if that’s a great name to have attached to a script about a potential nuclear strike, or a terrible one – whose aversion to linear storytelling was highlighted in his script for Pablo Larrain’s Jackie Kennedy biopic. The former president of NBC News lends some undeniable insight and expertise to A House of Dynamite, which is better suited to a framing device, and his script meshes well with Bigelow’s rigorous fascination with authenticity and naturalism, but it’s also hard to argue that the premise doesn’t get a little weaker and a little more self-congratulatory with each reset.

You can see this, I think, in small details that feel too kitschy for such a straight-laced movie. In the first two sequences – they’re all divided by title cards like an anthology – the U.S. President is kept anonymous by a blacked-out thumbnail on the video calls, but he’s revealed in the third act to be played by Idris Elba (last seen as the U.K. Prime Minister in Heads of State) in a way that feels too knowing. In the same sequence, there’s an Angel Reese cameo. The introduction of a bomber pilot feels like a cutesy homage to Bigelow’s Point Break, and at one point Tracy Letts (The Paper, French Exit), playing a no-nonsense general trying to advise on whether the U.S. should launch pre-emptive nuclear strikes against all of the superpowers who have responded to America’s increased military readiness by gearing up their own war machines, caps off an otherwise great monologue with a line that is clearly designed to be a quotable catchphrase for marketing materials.

There’s something about all this, and the sheer volume of recognisable film and TV stars in high-level government and military positions, that feels slightly counter to the plot’s intentions. On several occasions, but notably through Rebecca Ferguson (Silo, Mission: Impossible) in the first act and Gabriel Basso (The Hive, Hillbilly Elegy, The Night Agent) in the second, A House of Dynamite tries to communicate the idea that potentially world-ending crises are ultimately not the domain of political figureheads but everyday people who can barely keep their emotions in check. Ferguson’s quivering efforts to stave off a full-on breakdown, and Basso’s brilliantly understated realisation that he’s trying to pacify the Russian military while his six-months-pregnant fiancée is about to be killed in a nuclear strike, are fine moments of actorly flourish slightly undercut by the familiarity of the faces. Later, the Secretary of Defence (Jared Harris, Foundation, Carnival Row) calls his daughter, and she’s played by Kaitlyn Dever (Ticket to Paradise, No One Will Save You, The Last of Us) for no reason at all.

It’s a quandary, since you need an A-list cast for marketing purposes and it’s important that as many people see this movie as possible, because at its core it’s a morality play about impossible decision-making under extreme pressure in a meticulously realised simulacrum of the world we all live in. It’s about how quickly and how badly things can go wrong and how impossible it is for even competent, well-meaning people to rectify them. But it’ll constantly have you saying, “Oh, look, it’s Greta Lee from The Morning Show,” or something similar every time a phone call is made. And the recursive structure keeps killing the pacing right as it reaches its peak, restarting that star-spotting process all over again.

We should be thinking about nuclear weapons. That’s the underlying point, made in sometimes too-obvious ways and building to an austere point-proving climax in which it’s argued that the normalisation of nuclear armament will ultimately make mutual destruction unavoidable. The hook of A House of Dynamite – a title which, I think we can all agree, is fitting in context – is how small, sudden, and seemingly random an incident is necessary to function as the match that sets all our geopolitical kindling ablaze. And it makes the same point three times in a row for good measure.