A House of Dynamite should be fantastic. It starts with a great premise: Let’s do a procedural of what would happen if the U.S. faced a sudden nuclear attack via an ICBM in the Pacific, but of indeterminate origin. It could be Russian, Chinese, or North Korean. We look at the military, security state, and elected political apparatus moving into gear, anchored with a greatly talented cast: Idris Elba as president of the United States, Rebecca Ferguson as Captain Olivia Walker, the most senior officer in the White House Situation Room, Jared Harris as secretary of defense, and Gabriel Basso as a young deputy national security adviser. Finally, put the project in the hands of Kathryn Bigelow, who is a can’t-miss director of tension- and adrenaline-filled war-on-terror movies such as Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker.
And I can say that the performances and premise make A House of Dynamite worth watching if you have a Netflix subscription. However, instead of the sum of all fears, we have a film less than the sum of its parts. In a sense, it succeeds as a piece of exploratory journalism and, in doing so, fails as a drama.
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