By Jason Osiason

What a letdown. Noah Oppenheim plus Kathryn Bigelow somehow adds up to Peter Berg, and I still can’t quite believe I’m typing that sentence.

A House of Dynamite is built on a genuinely chilling concept. A single unattributed nuclear missile is detected over the Pacific, headed for the American Midwest, and the country has less than twenty minutes to figure out who fired it, whether to retaliate, and what any of those choices actually mean. Rebecca Ferguson plays Captain Olivia Walker, the Situation Room officer holding the line while everyone above her scrambles. Idris Elba is the President forced into an impossible call, Jared Harris is the Secretary of Defense, and Tracy Letts and Anthony Ramos fill out the military chain of command as the film cycles through the same countdown from different vantage points. Same missile. Same clock. New room each time.

That structure is the problem. The replay device is gripping exactly once. By the midpoint of the second act you realize the movie isn’t deepening with each pass, it’s just resetting, and the tension drains out of a premise that should have been unbearable. Bigelow made her name trapping us inside procedure until procedure became psychology. Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker let ambiguity do the heavy lifting and trusted us to squirm. Here the film keeps stopping to tell you exactly what to feel about nuclear deterrence, straightforward and politically preachy where you’d hope for complexity, and every time a character delivers the message, the movie gets smaller.

The dialogue doesn’t help. Characters announce their backstories at each other in exposition scenes that are honestly brutal to sit through, the kind of let-me-remind-you-who-I-am writing this cast should never have to perform. And one particular Jared Harris subplot, a personal thread the film keeps cutting back to for emotional ballast, is just plain silly. Harris commits, because Harris always commits, but the material treats a planet-ending scenario as a delivery system for one man’s therapy session.

There are still flashes of the real Bigelow buried in here. The handheld urgency of the early detection sequence at the missile defense base is legitimately great, a stretch of pure sweaty procedure with no speeches attached. The film shoots screens, phones and interceptor launches like weapons. A few wordless reaction shots say more about the absurdity of nuclear command than any of the monologues manage. When the movie shuts up and simply watches ordinary professionals process the unthinkable, you can feel the masterpiece version of this hiding underneath. It never stays quiet long enough. That’s the whole movie in one frustration: a director who taught us that procedure is character, saddled with a script that trusts neither. A doomsday thriller about the danger of systems running on autopilot that is, itself, running on autopilot. [C+]