A House of Dynamite (Netflix-2025)
By now, you might have picked up on the angry buzz surrounding this film's deeply unsatisfying climax. More on that a little bit later in this review.
Our instant impressions? At least the first third of it is a superb white knuckle doomsday thriller in the tradition of Sidney Lumet's 1964 "Fail Safe". Once again, the clock tick tick ticks down on nuclear Armageddon, with the military, the NSA bigwigs and POTUS himself hopelessly trying to thwart the end of the world as we know it.
Director Kathryn Bigelow ("Zero Dark Thirty", "The Hurt Locker") knows how to pump up worldwide suspense and dread to the max. As the film restlessly bounces between its various desperate and alarmed high level players, we watch the inexorable trajectory of a nuke headed for ground zero Chicago. Who launched it? Who knows....since the Russians and Chinese claim their innocence.....
A grand slam first third of the film, for sure. And then....kerflooey.....off the rails it goes.
The film backs up all the way to its beginning and presents the very same events, only from different characters' perspectives. While Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim are no doubt patting themselves on the back for their cleverness, the rest of us are rolling our eyes and emitting deep sighs.....
So the second third of the film becomes exactly a duplicate of the first, only from different angles and through the viewpoints of different people. This much we know......all efforts to stop the missile have failed, in a few minutes Chicago's toast and an anguished POTUS (Idris Elba) has those few minutes to decide whether to wait to see if any of our adversaries admit it was mistake or should our Prez simply retaliate and nuke the most likely suspect right away.
From this point, to continue to provide a comprehensive review of this film, we MUST discuss the ending. Therefore, major SPOILER ALERT coming up......so if you've yet to see it and would rather experience the film first, by all means go for it and then please return to read the rest of this post.
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And now the worst is yet to come. For an overwhelmingly aggravating third time, the film backs up yet again......same events, different perspectives. This time we do get to see Idris Elba as the POTUS stuck with the fate of the world in his hands...(he only existed as a phone voice in first two thirds).....
And here's what really set viewers on fire....for the third and final time, the film stops short of showing the President's ultimate, world shaking decision. Essentially, the film declares...."okay, YOU figure it out among yourselves......discuss."
So anybody waiting for those 1099 CGI animators to strut their stuff and treat us to the sight of Chicago blasted, melted and vaporized, forget it.
(Come to think of it, Sidney Lumet didn't show us New York and Moscow blowing up in "Fail Safe" either but nobody gave him a friggin' hard time about it....) (What a deep disappointment the "House of Dynamite" would be for Trump if he watched the film....denying him the joy of watching the Windy City reduced to dust in the wind....)
Believe it not, we at BQ didn't have that big a problem with that deliberately coy conclusion. It's clear that director Bigelow and writer Oppenheim's intentions here were to pose an always looming, terrifying situation and force us to ponder it.
But the problem arises from Bigelow's being too good at what she does, bringing the audience to the seat-of-their-pants excited anticipation for an expected gut-punch, powerhouse ending. It should've occurred to her that her deliberate academic, conversation-piece finale would make an audience think she was flipping them the finger.
As for Oppenheim, his ruinous triple-timeline structure only made us think he'd been flipping the finger at us from the very beginning. His work here will stand as one the most self-sabotaging screenplays ever written and produced.....a disastrous idea taken to destructive extremes. He dropped a nuke on his own film.
Here's what scared us to death even more than the film's attempts to do the same thing......instead of Idris Elba's obviously intelligent, decent, empathetic POTUS, we imagined these events happening for real......with the real President in office now, a mentally and physically declining idiot sociopath, an utter fool whose decaying mind believes only in the greater glorification of himself.
A thought more terrifying than anything this film serves up. 1 & 1/2 stars (*1/2).
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