Cody Bybee

I’m honestly in shock. Not because of the movie — but because Netflix actually released this. “House of Dynamite” feels less like a film and more like an endurance test designed by the CIA to see how long you can stare at radar screens before your brain melts. From the opening scene, you can tell something’s off. The lighting? Bleak. The acting? Like an HR training video with a budget. The dialogue? Imagine ChatGPT was asked to write “tense military chatter” after downing three Red Bulls and watching a single episode of 24. For nearly two hours, we watch a group of cardboard-cutout military officials bark acronyms at each other like malfunctioning walkie-talkies. There’s no emotion, no stakes, no sense that anyone knows what’s actually happening — including the director. The camera keeps cutting between “concerned faces” and “screens full of green dots,” which I guess is supposed to make us feel suspense. Spoiler: it doesn’t. It feels like watching someone’s computer buffer for 105 minutes. And let’s talk about the script — which must’ve been written during a power outage. Every five minutes, someone says something so dramatically stupid it makes you wonder if the Pentagon should start hiring toddlers. The President is taking personal calls, the generals are panicking over nothing, and the entire military response to a nuclear missile is apparently “send a couple rockets and pray.” It’s like watching Call of Duty if all the controllers were unplugged. When those interceptors miss (of course they do), the cast reacts with all the urgency of people who just realized they left the oven on. Then, instead of following through on the one plot point that matters — the incoming missile — the film just… forgets. It disappears. Poof. The supposed climax evaporates like the director got bored and went home mid-shoot. The pacing somehow manages to be both frantic and lifeless. You keep waiting for something — anything — to happen. Instead, you get endless reaction shots, generic sound design, and emotional monologues so forced they could be used in hostage negotiations. And then the ending. Oh my god, the ending. There isn’t one. It just stops. No explosion, no resolution, no message — just a cinematic shrug. It’s like the editor hit “Export” halfway through and said, “Good enough.” Even Idris Elba, normally a walking charisma bomb, looks like he’s counting the seconds until his contract lets him leave. His American accent deserves its own apology tour. It’s like he was trying to sound like Tom Hanks while chewing gravel underwater. “House of Dynamite” isn’t a movie. It’s a two-hour prank. It’s what you’d get if someone filmed a Pentagon LARP session and added dramatic music in post. The only explosion here is your patience detonating around the halfway mark. By the time the credits rolled, I didn’t even feel angry — just betrayed. If this movie were a person, it would apologize halfway through, forget why, and then walk away mid-sentence. If you’re considering watching it: don’t. Stare at a microwave instead. At least that builds tension and ends with something happening.