Kathryn Bigelow's 'A House of Dynamite' Is Uncharacteristically Dull

Watching people realize that they are caught slap bang in the middle of a rapidly unfolding disaster can be an incredibly compelling format for a story. It’s certainly one of my personal favorite templates. The story doesn’t even have to be set in a particularly exciting or exotic location for this to be the case. JC Chandor’s sublime 2011 account of the first rumblings of the coming tsunami that was the 2008 financial crash, Margin Call, remains one of my prime examples of this: taking place almost entirely in the anonymous crystal panopticons of a large investment bank—offices glittering, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, lording over the mortal realm below but otherwise banal and unremarkable—and composed overwhelmingly of people simply having conversations in those rooms, it is a film that wields its script and its pacing like a conductor’s baton. The mounting tension, the interplay of interpersonal dynamics with the broader context, the sheer drama—it’s glorious.

Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, A House of Dynamite, is very much in this mold, albeit nowhere near the quality level. Working from a script by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie, and former senior producer of NBC’s Today Show and somewhat controversial figure), its key ingredients are panic, disbelief, confusion, and the wildly diverging paths of the decision making of Very Important People. The inciting incident here? An entirely unexpected ICBM launch, seemingly aimed directly at the United States, its seriousness fatally compounded by its unknown provenance and late detection: the US has no idea who launched it, its detection systems pick it up already mid-flight, and each new, updated projection increases the severity of its eventual trajectory and impact. The ever magnetic Rebecca Ferguson plays the oversight officer for the White House situation room, whose initially routine day of playing policeman to the world is turned upside down before she even has a chance of finishing her coffee.

What follows is a breathless (at least in theory) ride through various government agency offices and vehicles, remote military bases, and, of course, the White House itself; all replete with monitors, staff with headsets, acronyms galore (including onscreen explainers for the viewer), and color-coded signs flashing as and when they need to (which they need to do a lot here). The ensemble cast, including Idris Elba, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, and Gabriel Basso, all do their utmost (Ferguson and Elba in particular) to try to inject Oppenheim’s script with a level of gravitas that it unfortunately does not deserve.

Clichés abound, some truly groan-inducing, and the film’s key structural hook—a three-way timeline split in which we circle back each time to view events from a different set of characters’ perspectives—is not enough to overcome the lack of depth granted to the people we are made to watch repeatedly. In fact, it ends up working against itself. If you’re going to peel an onion, at least make sure each layer reveals something interesting; otherwise, it just ends in tears and with nothing to show for it. I’m going to stay clear of political commentary except to say this story of a United States grappling with an existential threat coming from outside its borders feels curiously anachronistic. Unfortunately, this is probably the most interesting thing about the movie.

I’m not sure if many directors could have overcome the relative weakness of the material, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Kathryn Bigelow was perhaps not the ideal match for this project. Undeniably skilled as the director is, her strengths lie more in the popcorn direction. It’s admirable that she chose to stretch herself this way, but it didn’t yield fruit this time. Similarly, Netflix’s attempts at distracting from their pyroclastic flow of anonymous algorithmic slop that is helping to bury modern cinema by driving dumptrucks of money up to the lawns of prestige directors did not pay off on this occasion. It’s nowhere near the worst movie they’ve put out, but for the director, it’s certainly a new—sigh—big (a)low. Sorry.