Seeing A House of Dynamite two weeks after Paul Greengrass’s The Lost Bus really puts some unexpected shine on Greengrass’s ability to pass boilerplate Hollywood screenwriting for verité docudrama. In any universe, Kathryn Bigelow is a better director than Greengrass. Her run in the 90’s as an expert crafter of atypical blockbusters is without peers. Point Break and Strange Days perfectly capture the empty erriness of that decade’s capitalist takeover in Hollywood. This culminated in 2009, when The Hurt Locker showcased a different muscle. She suddenly became a director of direct political messaging, and it got her a Best Director Oscar (the first woman to do so). It also turned her into a “Director of Serious Movies”, that has followed her ever since, to diminishing returns. Is A House of Dynamite as bad as her criminal misfire Detroit in 2017? Maybe not, but it feels even less consequential, and a sign that Bigelow may have lost what made her such a special filmmaker to begin with.

The screenplay is by Noah Oppenheim (whose credits vary from 2016’s Jackie to The Maze Runner), and it concerns the US response system in the case of a nuclear missile strike. From the moment that the missile is discovered to the moment it makes impact is about 25 minutes. So how does one make a feature out of 25 minutes? Oppenheim opts to break the film into thirds, the same events from different perspectives and different positions within the chain of command. The first third is in the White House situation room, where Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), begins her shift as senior officer. The initial discovery is made by an Alaskan radar camp, and the news is initially met with skepticism. Surely this is just a billionaire’s vanity rocket. But it becomes clear that it’s an ICBM heading straight for Chicago, and Washington has less than half an hour to prepare not only for impact, but the effect it will have on America’s stance in the world’s political atmosphere.

We see the same events played from STRATCOM Air Force Base in Nebraska, where commander General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) begins to lobby for the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) and the president (Idris Elba) to begin the process of mobilizing an offensive response to the nuclear strike that hasn’t even happened yet. Some folks, like Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), beg for restraint. That striking back would only lead to nuclear holocaust. The final third of the film focuses specifically Elba’s unnamed president, who is only heard but not seen until over an hour in. At this point we are familiar with the sequence of events, but the scope diminishes, as the burden of decision falls on the conscience of a single man. By this point, suspense is difficult to come by since we already know exactly what will happen, and any hope that Bigelow would provide anything especially illuminating at the film’s conclusion will be gravely disappointed.

A House of Dynamite is a film that confuses extreme grimness with realism. That’s not to say that the film’s central thesis – that it’s only a matter of when world powers decide on mutually assured destruction – rings false. If anything, there’s a level of competence here that I wouldn’t expect from any current day administration. But Oppenheim’s script, and especially Bigelow’s execution of it, completely buckles under the real-time conceit. These “twenty-five minute” chunks often exceed 40 minutes, which not only warps the suspense, but calls into question any narrative integrity the film wishes to have. After all, “protecting the nation from nuclear attack is an extremely complex operation far above the understanding of everyday citizens” is not the rigorously cogent observation A House of Dynamite seems to think it is.

In a better world, Bigelow would no longer feel obligated to be making movies about such “serious” subject matter. Though it’s clear at this point that this is the kind of storytelling that she wants to do. Gone are the days of Near Dark, where Bigelow so effortlessly took the cheapest elements of genre and made something incredibly unique. Including Ferguson, Letts, Elba, Basso, and Harris, Dynamite‘s ensemble also includes Greta Lee, Moses Ingram, Jason Clarke, Anthony Ramos, and Kaitlyn Dever. The cast is extremely overqualified for the limited screentime and impact that these very talented actors are given. Often, they’re simply playing characters meant to up the ante by providing off-the-court stakes for our main players. The movie seems to forget that the premise itself is suspenseful enough without feeling the need to squeeze the “they also have children at home!” juice. This same overwriting virus plagued The Lost Bus, but I have higher expectations for Bigelow than Greengrass, which makes Dynamite‘s total flatline that much more disappointing.

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Directed by Kathryn Bigelow