Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, and Tracy Letts lead an ensemble cast in director Kathryn Bigelow’s suspense thriller.
More than 60 years ago, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove grappled with impending doom from opposite sides of the narrative fence: one starkly dramatic, the other wildly comic. Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, now streaming on Netflix, leans toward the straightforward Fail Safe approach, taking the threat of imminent worldwide destruction as a plausible likelihood that is likely unavoidable, no matter who is responsible for lighting the match that leads to eternal darkness.
It’s a depressing thought, which appears to be the intention of Noah Oppenheimer’s original script: Let’s scare everybody into backing off their insistent demands for weapons of mass destruction.
Less an issue movie than a political polemic, A House of Dynamite nonetheless cloaks itself with an all-star cast and top-notch production values, masquerading as a noir thriller with a foregone conclusion. As such, it’s quite entertaining through the first third, as it sets up a doomsday clock and the array of forces that inexorably fall into place after a deadly missile is launched, then becomes markedly less effective as it progresses.
The middle third of the movie, which rewinds events to reveal the perspective of the U.S. Defense Secretary (Jared Harris), and the final third, which rewinds events to show things from the perspective of the U.S. President (Idris Elba), who is out of his office when everything begins to go haywire, doesn’t flesh out the narrative, adding only a few personal details about the Defense Secretary and President in an effort to hint at the toll that will be wrought upon their respective families.
Though Harris and Elba are precisely grief-stricken in their performances, it’s a constant relief whenever they check back with a General (Tracy Letts) who is giving orders strictly from a military perspective. In Letts’ portrayal, his character has carefully compartmentalized his emotions into a box for later examination; since he is not overwrought, like the Defense Secretary and President, he becomes the Voice of Reason.
Except that he’s advocating for the U.S. to strike back immediately with the full might and power of the military, which will surely mean bombs completely destroying what remains of humanity. So there’s that, which casts a pall over the movie, which ends in a very inconclusive manner that will not satisfy viewers of any political stripe, and make A House of Dynamite feel less accomplished than it is. It’s still pretty scary.
The film is now streaming worldwide on Netflix.
Dallas Film Now. 