Nuclear holocaust isn’t really one of those things you can just shrug off, in life, or in storytelling. Even mentioning the potential calamity, ever drifting just above our collective head, is a sure-fire way to make ears perk up and glue butts to seats. The stakes are impossibly high, and so is the level of import, marking the conceivable apocalypse as one of the few movie subjects that’s inherently taken seriously. No need to name the others, nor the films that cover them; you’ve scrolled past each entry hundreds of times, believing wholeheartedly in their greatness and immediacy, and opting for lighter fare at the end of a hard week. A House of Dynamite is aware of your trepidation, and would like to meet you half way, a compromise that encases the bitterest of pills with the sugariest of action flick propulsion. For about 35 minutes, the arrangement seems mutually beneficial. About five ticks later, it starts to feel like a cop-out.

We’ll interrogate that bad faith reading in just a second, but introductions are in order, and there are a LOT of them to get through. After making the acquaintance of Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos), an Alaska-based military commander whose team notices an airborne warhead pop up on their radar, Dynamite whisks us away to Washington D.C. We’re greeted there by Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), amidst her oversight of the White House Situation Room, and the phone lines are abuzz. A few zoom calls and some updated calculations have everyone fearing the worst, fighting against a 20-minute countdown before the bomb lands in Chicago, with the death toll estimate threatening to eclipse 10 million. Everything’s down to the wire, the screen littered with digital clocks that tick away by the millisecond until everything abruptly cuts to black. 

On the other side of that darkness isn’t flattened skyscrapers or splintered city streets, but Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves (Jonah Hauer-King), floating horizontally in beatific ocean waters, calmly rising, and wordlessly heeding the call to action. His tranquility is born of ignorance, but let’s cut him some slack; in his neck of the narrative woods, the day is still young. Firing up its engines at roughly the same hour as the film’s opening chapter, this second block, titled Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet, relays the very same events from the perspective of a different batch of characters, primarily honing in on surly General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) and inexperienced National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso). Both were briefly seen or heard in the prior section, in keeping with the protagonists of the flick’s eventual third passage, concerning the sitting president (Idris Elba) and Defense Secretary Reid Baker (Jared Harris), among others. 

Despite updating its doomsday countdown with compulsive frequency, Dynamite’s retreats to the extremely recent past can’t help but scan as avoidance of the inevitable. The build up is more than enough to send cold sweat down your spine, but Noah Oppenheim’s Rashomon-indebted screenplay neglects to offer the conflicting facts and attitudes that make Akira Kurosawa’s he-said, she-said drama such a durable template. There’s nothing revelatory about seeing a fresh crop of faces go through the same chain of reactions, only the unavoidable release of tension as a horrific climax is delayed, and then delayed again. Whipping an audience into a frenzy with only words and tortured expressions is genuinely ambitious. Trying to do it on three isolated occasions, over the course of two tightly-wound hours, is fool-hardy.

Which isn’t the same as impossible, and with Kathryn Bigelow at the helm, it’s all but certain. After cutting her teeth on scuzzy spectacles like Near Dark and Point Break, the director broke into the Oscar conversation with 2009’s The Hurt Locker, eventually becoming the first woman to ever take home the award for Best Director. Breaking that particularly fraught glass ceiling set her career on an entirely different trajectory, replacing the autuer’s pulpier inclinations with a detail-obsessed chronicling of the American military industrial complex. Zero Dark Thirty may now be the subject of leftist skepticism and derision, but its ability to communicate reams of complex data without sacrificing even an ounce of kineticism remains astounding, even if the facts themselves have since been called into question. Dynamite doesn’t reach the same hallowed heights, but it’s not far off, proving yet again that Bigelow’s facility with nerve-fraying momentum doesn’t need explosions or acrobatics to retain its scintillating power.

It also doesn’t require this many name-brand thespians, but they’re here anyway, and in droves. Any excuse to spend time with Harris or Ramos (not to mention Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, and Kaitlyn Dever, among so, so many others) is a good one, but our familiarity with the performers works against the movie’s hard-earned sense of veracity. This may not be a problem for less attentive movie fans, but most folks clicking on Netflix’s new Kathryn Bigelow thriller are likely to be cinephiles, and for them, a subconscious game of ‘where do I know them from?’ is unavoidable. Ferguson and Letts are excellent in vaguely written roles that benefit from their performers’ craft and dexterity, but for the most part, there’s nothing gained through pseudo-stunt casting beyond a Pavlovian response from film fanatics who were already locked in anyway.

That last caveat refers to Elba, the lone character written with some shading. His POTUS isn’t a joke, but he’s not fit for the moment either, positioned in an intriguing middle ground between buffoonery and grace. Most presidential depictions choose between withering satire and shimmering heroism, but Dynamite’s highest office is held by someone whose unmissable charisma was enough to win the Electoral College, but proves inadequate under the brightest and most punishing lights. Wishing for more dimensionality from the rest of the cast misses the movie’s modus operandi, which prioritizes verisimilitude that’s lean, mean, and aerodynamic. Bigelow fetishizes competency with Sabrina Carpenter levels of enthusiasm, but Dynamite, like its 2025 spiritual sibling Warfare, inhabits a violent world where dedicated training and preparation aren’t always enough when foreign firepower waits just outside the gates.

Where, exactly, these assaults are coming from remains an open-ended quandary, as does the U.S.’ retaliatory measures. Such details are moot in the arena of moral fable, a primordial sandbox that Dynamite plays inside without locating anything of substance. This one’s all jet fuel, and taken exclusively on those terms, it’s hard to argue with what Bigelow and Oppenheim have cooked up here. Even with the glaring architectural problem of the three-pronged apparatus, the movie is taut, involving, and excruciating to behold. It just doesn’t mean anything, which shouldn’t negate its accomplishments, just as the topic at hand doesn’t guarantee significance. The ethics of weaponizing our tenuous world order to coax a cheap thrill will be in the eye of the beholder, but the film’s higher meaning is less open to conflicting opinions. There’s nothing here but adrenaline, masterfully devised and delivered, streaking across the surface of a project that’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Bigelow can blow your wig back with the best of ’em, which is plenty to recommend A House of Dynamite. Just don’t call it perceptive or incisive; it’s not even trying to be either.