'A House of Dynamite' review: Kathryn Bigelow's latest isn't chilling enough

I didn't know mobile networks could get as bad in the U.S. as in India. It happens a couple of times in A House of Dynamite, the new thriller from Kathryn Bigelow, streaming on Netflix. Whether it succeeds in thrilling us or not will be addressed shortly. Much of the initial stretches of the film don't feel too different from conferences in our own offices, chiefly those conducted in newsrooms. At first, the picture of people standing in front of monitors with occasional zoom-ins and zoom-outs immediately recalls the Jason Bourne films. If Kathryn Bigelow wasn't mentioned as director, I would've assumed Paul Greengrass directed it.

But this kind of faux-documentary approach isn't just Greengrass's area of expertise; Bigelow has dabbled in the same quite often. There was a marked evolution in style from the joyously cinematic, atmosphere-heavy work such as Near Dark, Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days, and K-19: The Widowmaker to the relatively grittier, shaky-cam aesthetic of The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and Detroit. But we can spot brief, seamless experiments with the latter approach in even Bigelow’s pre-Hurt Locker work, applied wherever the need arose for the viewers to be put in the protagonist’s headspace.

A House of Dynamite is an elevated version of Alfred Hitchcock's "bomb under the table" analogy, with meditations on moral and geopolitical concerns thrown into the mix. The "bomb" is a warhead fired by an unknown country, an event utilised by Bigelow to stage Rashomon-style perspectives switching between White House officials, security advisors, and senior military personnel, before introducing us to the President himself, played by Idris Elba.

With A House of Dynamite, Bigelow ventures into a territory similar to that in classic Cold War-era thrillers like Seven Days in May, Dr Strangelove, Fail-Safe — all released in the same year! The only difference here? We aren't told who the threat is, a narrative choice that may seem frustrating to some. Perhaps there's a point here. Why does it matter? After all, a threat is a threat, regardless of who pushed the button. How do we deal with it?

The onus is on the President, and Elba conveys all the necessary and palpable anxieties and dilemmas that plague a man in his position. He is not the hero of this picture. At one point, we get the kind of "hero entry" moment usually accompanying an address before a large gathering. The song is Phil Collins' 'In the Air Tonight', the kind of rousing composition that has even been used for comical effect in films like The Hangover. Elba walks into a women's basketball tournament with his bodyguards and a smile, with the song announcing his arrival. While he is "showing off", his aides comment on the same: "All of them are narcissists." Minutes later, something happens that immediately dispels the image of the “heroic leader” — a far cry from recent depictions in Hollywood, which include Elba's Heads of State (with John Cena and Priyanka Chopra).

But here's the problem with the film. It got progressively difficult to sustain my interest as we got into the third act, primarily because it slowly becomes apparent that this particular situation, which is supposed to be "tense" and "chilling," registers none. The staging of it all, especially the aforementioned Rashomon approach, begins to overshadow everything else. We are left with a sense of, "What's the point?" That is, if you don't already find yourself frustrated by all the technical jargon and acronyms being thrown about numerous times. At times, I had to pause the film to check whether the acronym being mentioned is indeed a reference to a certain regime or a submarine-launched ballistic missile (if I remember correctly). A House of Dynamite is not a film I'd categorise under 'terrible'; it simply ends up a bland, feeble affair when compared to better examples in a similar domain. Even a weak Kathryn Bigelow film has something interesting to say, even when the impact is short-lived.   

Film: A House of Dynamite
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke
Rating: 3/5

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