At The Movies: Rebecca Ferguson and Idris Elba cannot save A House Of Dynamite from repetitive dullness
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In A House Of Dynamite, Rebecca Ferguson plays Captain Walker, who tries to work out the origins of a missile launch and the reasons for it.
PHOTO: NETFLIX
A House Of Dynamite (M18)
115 minutes, available on Netflix
★★☆☆☆
The story: A missile, possibly armed with a nuclear payload, launches from Asia and is headed towards the United States. Impact is expected in minutes. In the White House situation room, Captain Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) tries to work out the origins of the launch and the reasons for it. At the same time, at a military command centre in Nebraska, General Brady (Tracy Letts) weighs his options. Walker and Brady report their findings to the US President (Idris Elba) and Secretary of Defence Baker (Jared Harris). As minutes tick by, officials are forced to consider the unthinkable: a retaliatory nuclear strike.
This Netflix movie fits the talky political thriller template to a tee. There is a looming security threat. Several courses of action are possible, so the sharpest minds in the nation’s administration bicker, each verbal strike wittier and smarter than the last. Their devotion to their ideals has hurt the people who love them, but sacrifices must be made to save America and, with it, the world.
Idris Elba plays the President of the United States in A House Of Dynamite.
It is a format that show creator Aaron Sorkin perfected in political dramas The West Wing (1999 to 2006) and other films and series which feature his signature scene: the “walk and talk”.
Film-maker Kathryn Bigelow’s previous work could not be less Sorkineseque: the war drama The Hurt Locker (2008), which made her the first woman to earn an Academy Award for Best Director, as well as military thrillers like Zero Dark Thirty (2012) featured men and women of action. Talkiness is emotional, and emotions get people killed.
There are two problems with Bigelow’s latest movie. The first is structural. The same event – the impending missile strike – is viewed by three groups of people, each representing a cross-section of those in charge of national security. Their points of view are explored in three chapters.
The first chapter is nail-bitingly tense, but by the time the second and third chapters land, all suspense has dissipated. Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim – who penned the political thriller Zero Day (2025), also for Netflix – crams in verbal fireworks and atmospheric detail, but the loss of suspense is fatal.
The second problem lies in its themes. The story views Asia as a pit where reason goes to die; where madmen from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia yearn to blow up the United States on a whim.
In contrast, everyone in Washington manifests humanity’s highest ideals. That cartoonish image of the world belongs in a Tom Cruise movie, not a thriller that purports to be realistic.
Hot take: The cautionary tale about nuclear weapons flops as a thriller because its repetitive structure kills suspense and its worldview reduces geopolitics to a cartoon.