A House of Dynamite | Reelviews Movie Reviews

Taut, relentless, and uncompromising, A House of
Dynamite’s greatest strength is its sense of plausibility. Stripped bare of
a Hollywood ending, some will find the film’s trajectory grim and unsatisfying.
Indeed, there really isn’t an ending at all because this movie isn’t about what
comes next but what comes before. It’s about moments lived on the razor’s edge
where choices can’t be unmade and actions can’t be undone. To be fair, much of
what percolates to the surface in Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay is pure
speculation. Yet the precision of so many details makes this one of the most
realistic depictions of impending Armageddon since Sydney Lumet’s Fail Safe,
serving as a serious counterpoint to Stanley Kubrick’s blisteringly satirical
take on similar material, Dr. Strangelove.

There are some issues. The most obvious is that there are too
many secondary characters with almost nothing to do except clog up the screen
and extend the running time. Pacing is also an issue. Divided into three acts
that repeat the same time period (albeit with different perspectives), the film
fails to achieve the high peak of its first act during the two that follow.
Still, the movie unnerves as we observe the inability of trusted officials to
cope and recognize how delicate the balance of MAD is when someone puts their
thumb on the scales.

The movie concludes with almost every major question left
unanswered. Oppenheim and director Kathryn Bigelow aren’t interested in
continuing the story past a certain point. Viewers will wrestle not only with
what will happen next but also what should happen next. This
ambiguity isn’t an attempt to tease a sequel; it’s an artistic choice. Some
will hate the movie because of it. Others will recognize that there’s simply no
way to extend the narrative beyond this point without expending more time than could
plausibly be given in anything less than a full-blown TV series.

A House of Dynamite’s first act is its most
harrowing. On a normal July day, people are doing normal things. At Fort
Greely, Alaska, base commander Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and his
subordinates are joking around when they note the flight of a previously
undetected ICBM over the western Pacific. Initially, they think it’s just
another North Korean test missile – something worth monitoring but otherwise
not alarming. In Washington, Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) arrives
at work in the White House Situation Room thinking this will be just another
day – more concerned about her ill son than anything in the sky. Secretary of
Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris) is playing golf. The President (Idris Elba)
is getting ready to speak in front of a school assembly. And General Anthony
Brady (Tracy Letts), a senior STRATCOM officer, is talking about the
performance of Francisco Lindor in the previous night’s MLB All-Star game.

Then everything changes. The seemingly harmless missile
doesn’t follow the expected trajectory. Instead, it goes suborbital and
projects an impact on the continental U.S. The precise target emerges: Chicago,
the nation’s third most-populous city. And there are only 18 minutes left – not
enough time to prepare or evacuate. All hopes are pinned on the $50B
anti-missile defense system (which one character refers to as hitting one
bullet with another bullet) while the President contemplates retaliation
options even though the identity of the perpetrator remains unknown.

For the movie’s first 40 minutes, Bigelow harnesses the same
degree of white-knuckle tension that was the hallmark of her Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker. However, when the movie decides to move forward by repeating
the same time period with (mostly) different characters, it spins its wheels a
little. There are enough new wrinkles and different points-of-view to make the
second and third acts gripping, but few would debate that the film ever again
achieves the heights of its first third.

By keeping everything tightly scripted and focusing almost
exclusively on being “in the moment,” the movie avoids anything resembling
partisanship. We learn nothing about the President’s policies or how the public
perceives him. Aside from the fact that his wife (Renee Elise Goldsberry) is on
a safari in Kenya and he has bad knees, personal details are few and far
between. The decision to completely de-politicize A House of Dynamite allows
it to avoid distractions. Still, the movie might have been better had it
trimmed the number of characters and focused more deeply on some of the key
ones. I would have liked to see more of Captain Walker, for example, who never
appears after the end of Act One.

Existential questions linger once the end credits have
rolled. When a frazzled Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington
(Gabriel Basso) advises against retaliation, the President counters that to do
nothing amounts to surrendering. Baerington’s response: It’s “surrender or
suicide.” That chilling rejoinder puts into perspective the recognition of how
different the rules of engagement are in a nuclear era. Living in a DEFCON 4
world, we conveniently ignore the Sword of Damocles that hangs above our
fragile reality. A House of Dynamite serves as a pulse-pounding, deeply
unsettling reminder.

A House of Dynamite (United States, 2025)