Bigelow returns once again to the genre of the military-political thriller with a premise where a nuclear missile of unknown provenance is heading for the continental USA and the clanking gears of the country's defence network have to go into overdrive to deal with the impending catastrophe. The scene constantly jumps for two hours from one military intelligence installation to another, each with its own set of characters either mechanically following protocol or falling to pieces. This is a thriller with no action content, just a fairly feasible insight into how the USA, the titular 'house of dynamite' armed to the teeth would actually go about dealing briskly with a real crisis. In that regard, it's more worrying than most horror films are. Nevertheless, the imperative to show the workings of the machine is very much in the driving seat, at the cost of any characterisation until Idris Elba is revealed as the U.S. President, having been kept off camera up to very late in the film, and gets to do some proper acting as he agonises over the limited range of executive options he has, all of them terrible.
6/10