For It Is Man's Number: gabriel basso

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Sunday, 4 January 2026

Netflix And Chill: A House Of Dynamite (2025)

Whatever I end up thinking of them, a new Kathryn Bigelow film is always something I look forward to watching. She tends to make films that refuse to provide easy answers for people. She tends to make films specifically for adult viewers. A House Of Dynamite is very much of a piece with the rest of her filmography.

The plot is quite simple. People in the White House Situation Room are soon made aware of a very worrying situation. There's apparently an ICBM heading towards the USA, due to hit Chicago in about 20 minutes. After figuring out whether it's real or not, everyone is out on high alert as they come up with various scenarios, and maybe even one or two ways to take the missile out of action. The main people involved in some frantic conversations are a duty officer, Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris), a Deputy National Security Advisor (Gabriel Basso), General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), and, of course, the President (hidden away for most of the film, but most will be able to recognise the voice before seeing him appear onscreen).

While he was a number of other screenplays under his belt, this is a marked step up in quality for writer Noah Oppenheim, who feels as if he has recently found his sweet spot with fictions based on many real scenarios he would have been very aware of during his tenure as president of NBC News. Teaming up with Bigelow, who has excelled in recent years with films that often feel like docu-fiction, but without ever losing that movie magic, is a win win for both.

It's hard to pick any individual highlights from the fantastic cast assembled here, but the final scene for Jared Harris certainly underlines his emotional turmoil as things look to go from bad to worse. Ferguson is great, as ever, and Letts is superb, seeming to relish the structure of the whole thing (we watch things play out, then jump back about 20 minutes to watch them from another POV, and then jump back again to follow someone else, learning a bit more each time while the missile continues to fly through the air). Basso is fine as the younger man trying to convince everyone to let cooler heads prevail, and there is room for many familiar faces throughout the supporting cast, including Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Willa Fitzgerald, and Kaitlyn Deaver, not to mention the star who plays POTUS.

It may not be as good as her last feature, the phenomenal Detroit, and there will be many who dislike the ending (one designed to keep you discussing the film for some time after it has finished), but this shows Bigelow handling busy and dark material with her usual steady hand and mastery. Whether or not you want to make it a priority on your viewing schedule just depends on whether or not you're in the mood for a drama that looks at what would happen if someone decided to launch a surprise attack on the USA. Considering the recent news cycle, it's hard to decide on just how far-fetched that idea is nowadays.

8/10

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Friday, 12 September 2025

Juror #2 (2024)

Two days in a row for legal thrillers on the blog. I could have planned things a bit better, but what the hell . . . my blog, my rules.

Written by Jonathan Abrams and directed by Clint Eastwood, Juror #2 is very entertaining for most of the 114-minute runtime. You have to work hard to keep suspending your disbelief though, especially when it comes to some of the moments engineered to specifically ratchet up the tension.

Nicholas Hoult plays Justin Kemp, the juror of the title. He's being asked to decide the guilt or innocence of a man (James, played by Gabriel Basso) accused of murdering his partner (Kendall, played by Francesca Eastwood) after a drunken argument witnessed by many people. What those people didn't witness was Justin also in that bar, looking at a drink that he was tempted by, before he drove home, hitting "something" in the road on the way. Justin thinks he can maybe convince the rest of the jury that James is innocent, but that will have people looking harder for someone to arrest for the crime. It's not just a criminal case. It's a political hot potato for Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), who wants to prosecute this case successfully before bagging a DA role.

It's easy to see why this screenplay would appeal to Eastwood and his cast. Every minute of the runtime seems to see the stakes and drama increase, and the leads barely get to catch their breath as they get swept up by the tide taking them towards a finale that should, at the very least, prompt a bit of conversation between people about what they would or wouldn't have done in Hoult's situation.

Hoult is a big plus for the film, and he's good enough to get through even the more ridiculous sequences without embarrassing himself too much. The same can be said of the other main cast members, but it's Hoult stuck with the worst plot points to work around. Collette and Chris Messina do the usual movie lawyer schtick, playing the prosecuting attorney and defence attorney, respectively. Basso has to spend a lot of the movie trying not to be too expressive, J. K. Simmons is good fun as an ex-cop on the jury who starts to smell a rat, and Zoey Deutch, Leslie Bibb, and Kiefer Sutherland get to make very little impact.

I'm not going to say that I didn't enjoy some of Juror #2, but I cannot recall the last time I watched something with such a strong premise go downhill so quickly. What I hoped was going to be a knotty and thought-provoking riff on 12 Angry Men turns into something so laughable and contrived that it's impossible to keep caring for the main character for the entire runtime.

If you can watch this without thinking about the absurd lack of logic then you may end up enjoying it, and I'm sure many can be carried through it all by the leads. Abrams and Eastwood make things very difficult though, the former not doing good enough with the writing and the latter not adding anything to distract from it. It may not be criminally bad, but it's not very good.

5/10