Review: "A House of Dynamite"

True to its title, Kathryn Bigelow’s latest suspense thriller has an explosive opening. 

A remote military base in Alaska detects an incoming nuclear missile headed toward the mainland of the United States. Its origin is unclear. For some strange reason, satellites cannot confirm the launch site. Was it Russia? Was it North Korea? Might it have been an enemy submarine? No one knows. What’s certain is that it is incoming and it must be stopped.

Repeated attempts to do that all fail, and the missile continues on its deadly path. Its target appears to be Chicago. The strike threatens to incinerate 10 million unsuspecting people, in one, ghastly instant.

It’s a terrifying premise, one that has been played out before in classic movies like Sidney Lumet’s “Fail Safe” back in 1964.  In that black-and-white cold war thriller, American bombers armed with nuclear weapons are erroneously given the order to drop their bombs on targets in the Soviet Union, including Moscow. The unnerving drama that unfolds revolves around the frantic efforts to stop the bombers and avert World War III.

“A House of Dynamite” makes the case that nothing much has changed in 60 years.  The world is a house filled with the dynamite of global destructive power and the ever-growing threat of self-destructive, thermonuclear annihilation. 

Bigelow is a master storyteller and movie director. She won several Oscars for her 2010 movie “The Hurt Locker” (for both Best Picture and Best Director). She’s a talented, seasoned filmmaker who knows how to create maximum suspense.

All that is evident in the opening reel of “A House of Dynamite,” setting the stage and introducing us to some of the major characters, including a top-level, high security White House staffer played by Rebecca Ferguson and a troubled military major played by Anthony Ramos. Bigelow takes time to humanize them, slowly building the basis of the plot.

The nuclear destruction of Chicago seems inevitable. As in all suspense thrillers like this, the clock is rapidly counting down early in the film. In an interesting narrative twist, the story suddenly, abruptly jumps back in time, without the usual on-screen graphics or devices that would normally inform the audience of the shift. It’s almost as if the projectionist got the reels out of order.

Without warning, the movie just resets the clock and takes us back through the events leading up to the final moments of the missile’s presumed impact. It happens several times. The plot structure of movies like “Rashomon” (1950) immediately comes to mind, with the same story being repeatedly told from several, different points of view. But in “A House of Dynamite,” the various versions of the story essentially rehash the same basic details. Granted, there are a few surprises and one major shocker, but the effort fails to offer further insight into the narrative of the rapidly unfolding events.

Bigelow’s raw, documentary-style direction is evident throughout the movie. But it’s a triumph of style over substance. The movie is basically the same 20-minute sequence of events told at least four times. When the clock counts down, the story rewinds. It’s a frustrating experience, teasing an ominous ending without ever showing it.

“A House of Dynamite” leaves the audience pondering the mind-crushing decision that the president (played by Idris Elba) must ultimately make—whether to retaliate and strike possible enemy targets, triggering a global nuclear exchange, or whether to accept the horrible, unimaginable loss of 10 million Americans in the hopes that the aggression will go no further, saving billions of lives in the end.

It’s the kind of heady ending that might have worked better in a book rather than a movie. In “Fail Safe,” an Air Force bomber destroys Moscow, and the President of the United States (played by Peter Fonda) makes the unimaginable decision to drop an atomic bomb on New York City, in an attempt to balance the books and settle the score, preventing an all-out nuclear war that would destroy humanity. It’s an ending you never forget.

“Fail Safe” was a movie on a budget that cleverly used every trick in the books to make the material work. The progress of bombers making their way into enemy territory was simply represented on giant video screens since the film’s budget (and tight military restrictions) prevented the filming of actual military aircraft. It worked. 

Much of the movie shows the President and his translator (a young Larry Hagman) in a dark, cramped White House bomb shelter talking on a clunky, hot-line phone to the Russian Premiere. That worked. 

And the climactic explosion at the end was shown, not with overused stock footage of a nuclear blast, but with a succession of street-scene freeze-frames, showing what people were doing at the moment their lives abruptly ended.  It was chilling.

“A House of Dynamite” successfully borrows some of the devices used in “Fail Safe” such as the ominous maps and video screens. Its failure is its inability to deliver the kind of groundbreaking, shattering finale that Sidney Lumet managed to do six decades ago.

“A House of Dynamite” is rated R.

Photos: Courtesy Netflix