A House of Dyn-o-mite! or “The sky is falling, a piece fell on Chicago!”
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Written by Noah Oppenheim
With:
Idris Elba as the President of the United States, Chicken Little
Rebecca Ferguson as Olivia Walker, a senior officer in the White House Situation Room, Henny Penny.
Gabriel Basso as Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington, Drakey Lakey
Jared Harris as Secretary of Defense Reid Baker, Turkey-lurkey
Tracy Letts as General Anthony Brady,
Cock-lock
Anthony Ramos as Major Daniel Gonzalez, commander of Fort Greely, a military base responsible for detecting incoming threats and destroying them with ground-based interceptor missiles. Goose-loose. So loose in fact the failure of his billion dollar system causes him to abandon his post to spend the rest to the movie puking. A true professional.
Moses Ingram as Cathy Rogers, a FEMA official with the Office of National Continuity Programs.
Foxy-lox.
Due to Bigelow’s inability to introduce characters in parallel action, we the viewers must endure several ”turn back the clock” actions to zero hour in an effort get it all in. As senior White House Situation Room officer is getting the news of an ICBM launch somewhere by someone (”who?”) in the Sea of Japan, or was it in the North Pacific?; at that exact moment (twenty minutes ago in real time), General Anthony ”Nuke ’em” Brady is arriving for work, playing grab-ass with another general officer (”Hey, how ’bout those Cubs!’’). phantom ICBM target? Chicago.
It seems the surveillance satellites were on a smoke break at the missile launch and missed the whole thing. The billion dollar interceptors, two of them, failed at the job and Chicago is well, best to cancel vacation plans for the Windy City.
Why the unnamed evil doers would nuke the home of the Chicago Cubs, and not, say more valuable targets like D.C., NYC (home of the Mets) or Mar-a-Lago (home of Mr. Big himself) is never explained.
”Nuke ’em” Brady is adamant the president must launch a strike to incinerate millions before Chicago is destroyed in the next two minutes. Why? Because he’s like Dr. Strangelove’s General Buck Turgidson, I guess.
There are some noisy and pointless scenes set at a Gettysburg Battle reenactment. Secretary of Defense Reid Baker cracks under the pressure
(”I didn’t sign-up for this”) and jumps off a building, not a minute too soon in my opinion. (it should be noted the very first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, jumped out a high window to his death).
There is a role-up credit for an Iceland unit (under unexplained sounds of muted explosions), yet there are no scenes set in Iceland. A FEMA official is introduced in DC only to be spirited away by the Secret Service, only to be next and last seen boarding a bus with panicky barnyard fowl, adding nothing to the narrative.
Apparently Bigelow wanted an all expenses paid trip to Kenya because there is a very short dialogue scene set there for no reason relevant to the story. Any stateside Wild Animal Park would have suited just fine if it was elephants they needed.
It is no secret Bigelow just loves Steadicam (many directors do). Telling her she could not use Steadicam would be like telling Jon Favreau he could not use CGI. Each of them would be frozen into retirement (not a bad outcome, considering).
However, I am unable to understand the why camera in the first half of this fiasco looks like the operator was a stumblebum drunk. The operative word in Steadicam being steady. Apparently, the drunk in question was able to sober up to shoot the last few reels.
The ending of A House of Dyn-o-mite! Is ambiguous so the end of this review must not follow that bad example. This movie sucks.
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