2025 | rated R | starring Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts, Gabriel Basso, Idris Elba, Jared Harris, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Willa Fitzgerald, Kaitlyn Dever | directed by Kathryn Bigelow | 1 hr 52 mins | 3 out of 5 stars |
When a single nuclear missile of unknown origin is launched from the Pacific into the U.S., members of the nation’s national defense scattered across Washington D.C. mobilize to stop the attack and launch a counter strike in the 20 minutes before it hits.
Renowned action director Kathryn Bigelow’s modern day apocalyptic political thriller is a case of the story structure overwhelming and cutting into the riveting possibilities of the story itself. The story traces the missile launch response from 3 different perspectives, starting at one riveting 20 minutes and rewinding to go through another 20 minutes at another perspective. Again and again. It misuses this structure, each time it does it cuts against the film’s intensity and gives us no new information in the story to justify it.
2025 seems to be the year for apocalyptic political thrillers and after the nuclear armageddon of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and the Dan Fogelman TV political thrill ride Paradise, I was primed and ready for a taut, procedural take on nuclear war, going behind the scenes into the secret chambers of power and see how the nation’s defense is maintained in its most harrowing moments.
According to A House of Dynamite, we’re f**ked.
I’ll be the first to criticize movies and TV for how often it depicts politicians as heroes, bravely going against the odds to do what’s right when the reality is more cartoonish buffoonery by people elected in a popularity contest and not through any skill. That said, I would still expect the people behind the scenes, in the situation room and the military command, executing processes built out of trial and error over decades to be somewhat skilled in what they’re doing. According to Bigelow’s film, our missile defense system doesn’t work, it’s foolish to think that it can and we don’t have a plan B if it doesn’t. Pack it in, we’re done. It doesn’t tell us why, nor how a missile would evade our systems and the film imposes an artificial ticking clock on how quickly the nation is supposed to respond to such an attack, all of which start to throw up so many questions I had a hard time going along with the ride.
Before we learn all of this, the first third of Dynamite is fantastic, and almost single-handedly holding up this 3/5 star score. It starts with the District of Columbia waking up and officials manning their posts for a seemingly ordinary day. Rebecca Ferguson leads this section as the commander of the Situation Room underneath the Pentagon. Everything here from Ferguson’s performance to the details of how they lock their phones up before entering to the computer glitches that make communication more difficult than it should be, are all compelling. We watch a tense game of bureaucratic telephone tag as information moves up and down the chain of command while the clock ticks down, odds are calculated and re-calculated and the grim reality of the situation sets in. It’s one of the best procedural thrillers since United 93.
Then we restart and the movie starts to lose a little steam, cutting now to the military side of those video calls, lead by Tracy Letts in the STRATCOM headquarters and security advisor Barrington (Gabriel Basso) racing into the building to make the meetings. This section, alone, is also great. Tense, well shot, well-acted, sharply written, But the movie is locked into this multiple-POV structure that it absolutely does not need. Unlike this year’s Rashomon-esque puzzle Weapons which illuminates new sides of a mystery until we get the whole picture with each story reset, Dynamite’s multiple POV slices don’t do that. It starts to feel like filler. Further, Letts is trapped in the war-making general trope that demands we strike back as soon as possible.
By the time the film has wound to its third act, and third reset, and finally introduced its kept-in-the-shadows President (Idris Elba), the damn thing has lost all steam and only become a frustrating exercise in wheel-spinning. It’s fun to watch the poor sap who follows him around with the nuclear football start cracking open the code book and reading off the instructions again, from a procedural level. And then it happens – the most unforgivable non-ending of any movie I’ve seen in quite a while. You’ve seen movies cut to credits before, but not quite like this. Bigelow ends A House of Dynamite not on an artistic ambiguous ending, but one of sheer cowardice. It’s less about prompting dialog and letting our imagination wonder then it is about the film coping out and backing away from any responsibility of any ending that it has set up. There are a hundred ways, at varying budget levels you could have staged any of its telegraphed possible endings. Instead, the movie simply choses to sit on its hands and say nothing.
A House of Dynamite is Kathryn Bigelow attempting to burning some capital as the premiere female action director on an adult, procedural, political nuclear thriller. She wants to make Fail Safe for the 21st century. Except Fail Safe has an ending.