“House of Dynamite” is a major failure from a great filmmaker

A little of this plays to Bigelow’s strengths. She has previously directed at least one film about the nuclear crisis, the Soviet submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). But, at her best, she has a gift for making the passage of time seem loose, hypnotic, and poetically indeterminate, never manipulated or artificially compressed. She is adept at portraying the inner lives of real people doing their jobs under real working conditions. That’s not the kind of thing you can achieve with the kind of quick and superficial “24” cosplay, no matter how accurate the DC production design it comes with. Even as a title, A House of Dynamite is surprisingly a mouthful of metaphor, especially from a director whose previous film titles have often shown a penchant for terse, evocative language (“Near Dark,” “Strange Days,” “Point Break”).

Bigelow has often been accused of being apolitical, or, because of her fascination with the laws, rituals, and aesthetics of men at war, fostering an ardent fascination with American militarism. Within the broader bureaucratic landscape of “House of Dynamite,” she presents such a pessimistic view of the U.S. response to disasters, even with a government so much more effective and efficient than the one we have today, that it is difficult to read any of it as propagandistic—or, for that matter, politically specific. (Some character details suggest a slew of partisan associations: A woman briefing the White House press corps is a wake-up call for Jen Psaki, former President Joe Biden’s first press secretary. Elba’s boss poses for a photo op with young basketball players as disaster strikes — a kinder version of the moment President George W. Bush first received word about the September 11 attacks, during a reading At an elementary school in Florida for “Pet goat“.”)

In another, crucially important way, “House of Dynamite” feels like a decisive break from Bigelow’s recent work. Her previous two films had been criticized for their use and representation of violence: Zero Dark Thirty was accused of distorting torture scenes to defend torture, and Detroit (2017), an underappreciated drama set during the civil rights era, was criticized for exploiting the same atrocities it sought to condemn. By contrast, “House of Dynamite” is devoid of bloodshed on screen, right down to its muted ending. I counted one death — an unexpectedly funny one — but the looming mass slaughter remains an off-screen abstraction, perhaps even a sign of artistic restraint.

So why does it look like nerve failure? I am not suggesting that Bigelow should have depicted the destruction of a major metropolitan city and its human inhabitants; We have Roland Emmerich for that. But perhaps this large-scale disaster saga has unnerved us more effectively than this wonky room exercise and whatever it thinks it’s doing. Like last year’s “September 5,” which semi-dramatized the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics from the perspective of an ABC Sports crew, “Dynamite House” inadvertently suggests that the control-room thriller, as a genre, may be approaching its limits, with its clichés, evasions, and theatrical gimmicks no less formulaic than any successful film.

Earlier this year, we witnessed a hugely successful film that, without pretense of realism, raised a chilling warning of an impending nuclear catastrophe. “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” wasn’t a particularly satisfying film, but it did feature a thorny and thoughtful war-room debate over what, if any, precaution the president should take in the apocalyptic event of a superpowered AI villain taking control of the world’s nuclear arsenals. In its strange way, the film captured the sum of all the fears that “House of Dynamite” was trying to convey: the horrors of the unchecked spread of nuclear weapons, the doubts about how enemies and allies alike would respond, and the growing possibility of global catastrophe. I have no idea how plausible any of it is; The point was that hair Makes sense, because director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie wanted it to, with unusual cinematic verve, in the material of vividly imagined fantasy. Bigelow and Oppenheim seem eager to provide something more than mere entertainment, and as a result, they end up with something less straightforward. ♦