1 October 2025

A House of Dynamite implodes in its third act

Kathryn Bigelow’s latest action film is nicely edge-of-the-seat – until Idris Elba makes his appearance

There are so many countdowns to doom in the latest Mission: Impossible it’s hard to keep count. Four? Five? I forget. A generous serving of this trope, obligatory in all explosive thrillers. Yet countdowns can be real too. Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been setting the Doomsday Clock, anticipating global catastrophe. It now stands at just 89 seconds to midnight.

A House of Dynamite, the first film by Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) since the box office failure of her racial drama Detroit in 2017, is the mother of all countdown movies. A nuclear missile is heading towards Chicago, launched by an unidentified enemy from somewhere in the Pacific. It’s due to impact in just 19 minutes. In the White House and America’s military bases everybody scrambles to meet this threat, first trying to intercept the missile, then to decide whether to launch a pre-emptive counter-strike, a decision that must be taken by the president alone. But how can he decide, when he does not know for sure who is responsible, even if suspicion must fall on North Korea?

Bigelow is in her element with soldiers facing terror, and she has engineered the film with scriptwriter Noah Oppenheim, formerly president of NBC News. It is filmed with terrific mobility by Paul Greengrass’s favourite cameraman, Barry Ackroyd, and driven by a frightening soundtrack from Volker Bertelmann.

Even though countdowns are often stretched out in film time to build anxiety, the duration of the missile’s flight towards its target clearly could not sustain a full-length feature. Instead, A House of Dynamite has been structured as three successive takes on the same story. The third iteration follows the story of the president himself, who has been unseen until this point. By the time we get there, we know only too well what is coming – anguish and dread taking over from suspense.

In the first take, we follow Captain Olivia Walker (a steely Rebecca Ferguson, best known as Ilsa Faust in three Mission: Impossible films), a mother with an ailing child at home, who finds herself unexpectedly in charge of the White House Situation Room on this worst of all days. The SBX (sea-based X-band radar) tracks the missile, and GBIs (ground-based interceptors) launch from Alaska, but the EKVs (exo-atmospheric kill vehicles) fail to bring it down. “Your orders, Mr President!” Walker demands.

In take two, we follow the military commanders over the same time period. Tracy Letts is chilling as the bullish general in charge at US strategic command, while Jared Harris is unsettling as the troubled secretary of defence, whose daughter lives in Chicago. Gabriel Basso plays the sympathetic deputy national security adviser with a newly pregnant wife, desperately trying to make contact with the Russians, and Greta Lee is the North Korea expert, phoning in from a noisy Gettysburg re-enactment with her son. All are effectively cast.

The film’s major wobble is the casting of the president, who has been abruptly summoned from a glad-handing appearance with a schoolgirl basketball club to decide the fate of the world aboard Marine One. Morgan Freeman has been perfectly presidential in Deep Impact and the … Has Fallen thrillers. However, this Potus is played by Idris Elba, and he is not up to the job – though it is difficult to decide whether that is a matter of character or performance. His president is clownish and wholly unprepared when handed the folder setting out the options for the scale of nuclear retaliation. “I’ve never seen it before; it’s like a fucking dinner menu – I’m asking for your help, son,” he says to the aide carrying the “nuclear football”. “I actually call them medium, rare and well-done – it’s sick, I know,” the officer replies, attempting levity. The president telephones his wife, on safari in Kenya, for advice – but the line is bad. Can this really be intended as satire? Or is Elba unconvincing as an authority figure? Either way, it is awkward.

A House of Dynamite owes much to the scarifying Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize last year, without taking the story as far as she does or identifying North Korea so clearly as the antagonist. It warns us that the decision to launch is ultimately in the hands of a single individual. In America, that person is Donald Trump; in North Korea, Kim Jong Un. Obscuring that reality by not naming them outright makes this countdown movie, gripping though it is, more of a genre exercise. The result is more of a standard Netflix product – and less pertinent – than it might have been.

“A House of Dynamite” is in cinemas now

[Further reading: The Hack is missing its heart]