An explosive 'House of Dynamite'

 

    Terse and chilling, director Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite tackles a situation most of us would prefer not to contemplate: a nuclear attack on a major American city.

    Working from a screenplay by Noah Oppenheim, Bigelow divides her movie into three sections, each offering a different vantage point on the same brief time during which a missile hurtles toward the US.

    Few in the movie’s large ensemble of military and civilian characters are psychologically prepared for an event that probably will kill 10 million people in the initial blast. Scores of additional deaths from fallout are sure to follow. The missile's origins are unknown, but it's headed for Chicago.

     Those familiar with previous Bigelow hits such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Hurt Locker (2008) know she’s skilled at sustaining tension, and A House of Dynamite  stands as confirmation of her ability to rivet attention. In keeping with an intensely concentrated approach, Bigelow shorthands character development, opting instead to put her characters to the test.

    How quickly can they accept that they’re not dealing with a routine exercise? How good are they at handling  fear? Can they react reasonably under intense pressure?

     A strong and well-selected cast includes Rebecca Ferguson as a White House Situation Room official, Gabriel Basso as a Deputy National Security Advisor, Jared Harris as the Secretary of Defense, and Idris Elba as the President of the United States. Tracy Letts portrays a folksy general who commands personnel who scan banks of monitors. A FEMA official (Moses Ingram) tries to prepare an evacuation response.

     House of Dynamite employs too many actors to name them all. Many roles are relegated more to function than revelation. Still, Ferguson, Harris, and Elba convey the emotions accompanying concern for those outside the security perimeter, seen in glimpses that remind us that most people are unaware of a pending Armageddon.

      Snippets of story detonate along the way. A Major General at a remote outpost (Anthony Ramos) falls into despair when his crew fails to intercept the missile. The Secretary of Defense grapples with the fact that his daughter lives in Chicago, the targeted city. An expert on North Korea (Greta Lee) watches a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg with her son when she's called for advice.  

       This contrast between two kinds of horrible warfare may be a bit on the nose for a movie that avoids extraneous observation, but A House of Dynamite mostly meets its subject head-on.

      Given current preoccupations — wars in Gaza and the Ukraine, National Guard troops in major cities, and a government shutdown — A House of Dynamite may seem a little out of sync with today's worries.

    Perhaps that’s the point. Bigelow’s movie serves as a sobering tap on the shoulder from someone intent on reminding us that other dangers lurk. Heaven forbid that one day a missile makes a mockery of the quotidian unfolding of what, for most of us, will begin as just another day. 

 

'Man on a Ledge' plunges into mediocrity

A convicted cop makes an unusual ... er ... totally improbable stab at proving his innocence.

If a movie puts a man who's threatening to take the big leap on a ledge some 200 feet above a New York City sidewalk, it’s reasonable to expect that some tension will follow.

In the prosaically titled thriller, Man on Ledge, director Asger Leth does create a bit of tension, but the movie that surrounds the title character is too painfully improbable to keep eyes from rolling.

Instead of the tightly focused picture its title suggests, Man on a Ledge turns out to be an unsatisfying mixture of vertiginous teases, heist-movie ploys and bad cop/good cop moralizing.

Sam Worthington, of Avatar fame, plays Nick Cassidy, the man on the ledge, a former New York City cop who was sent to prison for stealing a valuable diamond.

The screenplay by Pablo F. Fenjves quickly shows us how and why Cassidy wound up on the ledge, where he spends most of the picture.

I won’t burden you with a plot summary, except to say that Cassidy, his brother (Jamie Bell) and his brother’s girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) are involved in a preposterous scheme that’s supposed to prove Cassidy’s innocence.

If you’ve seen even a couple of movies, you’ll quickly be able to separate the bad guys from the good guys, but I’ll give you a rapid rundown of the supporting cast, which includes Elizabeth Banks (as the detective called to talk Cassidy off the ledge); Edward Burns (as a skeptical cop who doesn’t think Banks’ character is up to the job); and Anthony Mackie (as Cassidy’s former partner and purported best friend).

Special mention needs to be made of Ed Harris, who plays David Englander, the real-estate tycoon who owns the building where Cassidy stages his ledge stunt. Englander’s greed and insensitivity are so blatant, they stand out like an overly wide and aggressively garish tie. Getting a bad – i.e., caricatured -- performance from an actor as gifted as Harris takes some doing, but Leth manages it.

Other annoyances crop up: Bell and Rodriguez banter in ways that are neither funny nor believable, and the standard crowd gathers to encourage Cassidy to jump, thus ensuring that a major cliche gets its unruly due.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Kyra Sedgwick, who plays a hard-bitten New York TV reporter. Sedgwick’s Suzie Morales roots for the most lurid and gripping possible story. It didn’t take long for me to begin to share Suzie’s point of view.

So if I was at all tense by the end of this one, it was probably because I was waiting for someone to talk me down from the ledge disbelief.

Quiet killer, quiet movie, quiet Clooney

I can’t remember the last time a George Clooney movie arrived in the marketplace with less buzz than The American, a purported thriller about a hit man in the midst of an existential crisis. Filmed mostly in Italy – with a European supporting cast – the movie’s title misleads: The American, couldn’t be further from the Hollywood noise machine. It plays like a deliberately paced foreign film.

Nothing wrong with that except that the script by Rowan Joffe (28 Weeks Later) seldom digs beneath the surface. Credit director Anton Corbijn with taking a non-exploitative approach to potentially volatile material, but subtract points for Corbijn’s inability to sustain tension, a vital part of even the most cerebral of thrillers.

Despite its pretensions, The American doesn’t measure up to the kind of work we’ve come to expect from Clooney, a movie star with the sort of adventurous taste that has attracted him to movies such as Up in the Air, The Men Who Stare At Goats and Michael Clayton.

The American provides us with little background about Clooney’s Jack, an assassin who knows how to modify weapons for use in nearly any situation. Clooney deadpans his way through most of the movie. That fits the socially isolated character he’s playing, but also holds an audience at arm’s length.

To complicate matters, Jack’s background is hardly fleshed out. Tattoos suggest military experience. That’s about it. If this is a character study, it’s one without a character.

Jack (sometimes called Edward) might be working for a government agency. He might be an independent contractor. He spends most of the movie in an Italian mountain village. Presumably, we’re not supposed to care too much about the past. We’re expected to occupy ourselves with the question that persistently intrudes on Jack's life; i.e., can a man who takes lives ever hope to build one?

Not surprisingly, Clooney’s graying character has grown tired of the hard life. To succeed at his job, Jack can’t have friends or lasting relationships with women. He lives a monkish existence. He sustains an interest in butterflies, creatures that symbolize the transformation Jack wants to make: from killer to a man who’s able to live normally.

To make the obvious even more blatant, Clooney’s character engages in transparently “deep” conversations with a kindly village priest (Paolo Bonacelli). To give himself a semblance of human connection, Jack visits Clara, a local prostitute (Violante Placido).

For all their attempted realism, the filmmakers don’t exactly go hardcore on Placido’s character, a woman who looks none the worse for the wear of a profession that usually tends toward rougher edges. Can Jack and Clara find happiness together or must he pay the bill for past sins? How heavy are the sins? Consider this: Jack kills three people before the opening credits have even rolled.

When the movie reaches its climax, plot developments don’t seem entirely credible. That’s more forgivable than an inherent confusion at the movie’s core: Listlessness is not the same as quiet intrigue. For a long time, though, I found myself appreciating the movie’s approach: a parsimonious use of music, Clooney’s emotional minimalism, the monastic quality of the hotel rooms Jack occupies. But after a time, it becomes clear that this kind of heightened attention also suggests an absence of urgency.

Corbijn also, I think, overestimates our interest in the mechanics of assassination, turning Jack into a kind artisan of murder. He’s very precise in his labors, machine tooling various parts of the rifle he’s assembling for that one last job. He’s building the weapon for a woman (Thekla Reuten) who has been hired to assassinate an undisclosed target.

True to its butterfly symbolism, The American seems to want to transform from a genre piece into something more significant. As you probably have gathered, the movie takes itself quite seriously – which in this case proves less of a virtue than you might suspect. Clooney fans, thriller fans and art-house fans all may experience a mild letdown from a movie that seems to want to say something profound, but can’t quite get to it.

The American takes admirably careful aim, but ultimately misses its target.