"Kathryn Bigelow is justly hailed as a great action filmmaker. She's less appreciated for her skills as a portraitist, and specifically a portraitist of highly intelligent people doing extraordinarily difficult, complex, high-stakes work. " Zero Dark Thirty " (2012), a tough-minded thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, made a grimly focussed study of a C.I.A. analyst embracing her killer instincts to the full extent that her job demanded."
"That's why the nuclear-countdown thriller "A House of Dynamite," which is playing in select theatres ahead of an October 24th streaming debut, on Netflix, feels like such a bewildering misuse of Bigelow's talents. The movie, which posits an impending nuclear strike on a major American city, is a flimsy yet high-minded piece of doomsday schlock, largely populated by ciphers in suits and drained of the pulp pleasures that schlock, at its best, can afford."
A House of Dynamite imagines an impending nuclear strike on a major American city and stages a hyper-adrenalized control-room thriller around the countdown. The film relies on acronyms, ticking clocks, and multi-front crisis management from frontline defenders to corridors of power. Performances are frequently reduced to ciphers in suits, and the screenplay is thin, producing flimsy, high-minded doomsday schlock rather than sustained character study or pulp pleasure. The production misuses restrained realist techniques that previously illuminated technical expertise in films like Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker. The result privileges spectacle over believable character and dramatic clarity.
Read at The New Yorker
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