When a solitary missile signature flickers across early-morning radar, its trajectory locked on U.S. territory and origin obscured—perhaps a foreign adversary, a hack, or a system failure—the clock begins ticking in high-stakes command posts. As the President urgently confers with his national security advisor, dissecting streams of satellite data and intercepted chatter, an intelligence analyst delves into encrypted trails that hint at Russia, China, or an inside breach.

A House of Dynamite Review

“Subverting expectations” became a curse word for many after Rian Johnson gutted Star Wars with it. And, while it has its place as a potentially powerful narrative tool, he definitively proved that it’s not a substitute for quality storytelling. Unfortunately, those responsible for A House of Dynamite learned nothing from Johnson’s failure.

Featuring what amounts to four roughly thirty-minute episodes that cover the same ground from four different characters’ perspectives, A House of Dynamite is almost watchable. It has a mostly serviceable script and solid performances from its actors. Although it’s incredibly exposition-heavy in its failed attempt to channel Aaron Sorkin’s grandiloquent verbosity, the dialogue never drags and rarely feels artificial. It simply lacks the punch and pop that made even Martin Sheen sound brilliant and dignified.

Its handheld camera cinematography can get a little tiresome after a while and occasionally robs dramatic moments of some of their gravitas by giving them a home-movie quality, but it’s not aggressively artistic or pretentious either.

Viewers might end up feeling nauseous, but if it’s not because of the cinematography, it’ll be the music. The score is virtually an identical series of dramatic tones screeching and basso thrumming on loop throughout. It’s barely a step up from a keyboard synthesizer.

However, what wrecks the film is its unprecedented lack of an ending. As alluded to earlier, it’s one thing to subvert audience expectations to serve up a satisfying surprise, but what I can only assume was director Kathryn Bigelow’s attempt to emulate the watercooler talk about Leo’s spinning totem in Inception, A House of Dynamite’s end falls off the cliff and lands with a rubbery-smelling whoopee cushion fart. Literally, nothing happens. It cuts to black, and the credits roll with no resolution, no tying together of events, and no conclusion of any kind. The movie simply stops. Subverting my expectation for an ending of any kind, good or bad, is the most boneheaded filmmaking choice since Amazon gave people money to make Ice-T’s War of the Worlds.

A House of Dynamite is a lit fuse with a confetti-filled ACME rocket at the end, and the audience is the Coyote.

WOKE REPORT

Washington DEI

• Yes, there’s a ton of artificial diversity and women in what are traditionally male roles. However, 98% of the film takes place within the Washington D.C. beltway. Even most of what doesn’t, still involves those who work there but are out of the office. So, I didn’t mark the Woke-O-Meter down much for this because it’s a fair representation of what D.C. has looked like for a long time.

I’ll Be at the Gun Club

• Rebecca Ferguson’s character is a senior NSA official with an important job. Meanwhile, her husband takes care of the childcare.
  • The reason that this didn’t lower the Woke-O-Meter much is that, first, he’s obviously a professional as well, so at least he wasn’t a stay-at-home dad, and, second, he’s barely in the film, and the only reason that he is is to give Ferguson’s character a reason to cry in a scene.

WNBA

• Angle Reese has a cameo. It’s not woke because she’s black. It’s woke because she’s terrible, seemingly a bad person, yet she gets a cameo because she’s black and a woman. However, she has one line that consists of three or four words and is on screen for fewer than three minutes.