Tag: Anthony Ramos

A House of Dynamite (2025)

Terrifying, compelling and gripping it-could-happen drama about the madness of nuclear war

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Cast: Rebecca Ferguson (Captain Olivia Walker), Idris Elba (President), Gabriel Basso (Deputy NSA Jake Baerington), Jared Harris (Secretary Baker), Tracy Letts (General Anthony Brady), Anthony Ramos (Major Daniel Gonzalez), Moses Ingram (Cathy Rogers), Jonah Hauer-King (Lt Commander Robert Reeves), Greta Lee (Ana Park), Jason Clarke (Admiral Mark Miller), Malachi Beasley (SCPO William Davis), Brian Tee (SAIC Ken Cho), Renée Elise Goldsberry (First Lady), Kaitlyn Dever (Caroline Baker)

“That’s what $50 billion buys us? A fucking coin toss?” the Secretary of Defence (Jared Harris) plaintively wails as he discovers yet another weakness in the USA’s defence infrastructure. It’s one of many grim realisations filling A House of Dynamite, a relentlessly horrifying look at what might actually happen if a nuclear missile was launched at the United States: and how, in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Friends, the US President (Idris Elba) can go from shooting hoops at a charity event to flicking through menu-style list of world-ending options, being told he has a three minute window to make a decision that could be final for all of us. House of Dynamite makes clear to us all: the fate of the whole world effectively rests on a series of coin tosses we have no influence over.

Bigelow’s intense, brilliantly shot and edited film, plays out the same eighteen-minute scenario from different perspectives. A glitch in the USA’s satellite network misses the launch of an ICBM, somewhere off the coast of Asia, heading for Chicago. Disbelief and panic swiftly sets in at every level of the US administration. Anti-missile defence systems miss (that’s the coin toss, as we’re told it only has a 61% success rate in tests). A decision needs to be taken whether to follow policy and launch a counter-attack before the nuke hits. It plays out from three primary perspectives: Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), senior officer on duty in the Situation Room; Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), deputy NSA covering for his under-anaesthetic boss, begging Russia to stand-down their forces as the US goes to DEFCON1; and finally the President (Elba), out-of-his-depth in a nightmare where he feels powerless and totally unprepared.

Powerless and unprepared become the guiding feelings in US defence, as people slowly release the best cast scenario is only losing 10 million people in Chicago and their worst (most likely) case is everyone dying in a nuclear conflagration. Bigelow’s film, shot with the hand-held intensity of a combat film, grabs you with a vice like grip as it plays out this nuclear nightmare. A House of Dynamite only ever gives us the same information as the fictional administration trying to make impossible choices. Like them we never find out who launched the missile, if it’s the first of a wave or even if it’s fully armed ICBM. All we know is the strike on Chicago quickly becomes inevitable and, with that fact, the world as we know it is over. Bigelow’s film (although it is not as clear in its clarification of US launch policy as it could be) places the system (which offers few choices and no alternatives) as the antagonist.

It also makes clear that nuclear war can happen at a time totally not of our choosing. Here it unfolds on a regular morning. The President is at an inconsequential publicity event, reduced to dialling into a world-shaking video call from a mobile: and he’s barely a month into his administration. The National Security advisor is in an operating studio and his unknown assistant is reduced into running through gridlocked traffic to get into the office. A designated FEMA expert (Moses Ingram) has just been appointed and at first believes the whole thing is a drill. The NSA North Korea expert (Greta Lee) is at a Gettysburg reconstruction with her young son. The Situation Room is undergoing maintenance and the Premiers of Russia and China can’t be raised on the phone.

A House of Dynamite doesn’t land cheap shots: it’s portrait of the members of the administration and the US defence infrastructure stresses their level-headedness and professionalism. Indeed, their competence makes the complete lack of control they have all the more alarming. Tracy Lett’s STRATCOM General keeps a professional level-headedness, even as he dutiful advises sticking to a nuclear policy which will effectively end the world. Rebecca Ferguson’s composed, calm and collected Naval captain finds herself increasingly aghast but only allows herself a few moments of tears after a goodbye phone call to her husband, clutching a toy dinosaur gift from her son. Anthony Ramos’ missile base commander reassures his staff this is what they have trained for: right up until the point where their interceptor missile misses and he slips into near catatonic shock as he realises that life’s training was for nothing.

Politicians are similarly portrayed as decent, but fundamentally unprepared for the situation. Idris Elba’s suave president looks every inch the confident leader, but it’s revealed he’s uncertain, hesitant, terrified of looking weak and his skills of schmoozing the public utterly useless for this situation. Jared Harris’ Defence secretary is only marginally more on-top of his brief (he reveals the nuclear war briefing is less than half an hour because it was seen as so unlikely to happen) and, for all his competence, becomes increasingly distracted at the thought of his estranged daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) facing death in Chicago. Gabriel Basso’s Deputy NSA seems at first absurd, but grows in statue as he desperately tries to salvage global survival.

Bigelow’s film makes clear this is a lose-lose situation. It’s a film about the constricting pressure of panic. Panic leaves assured professionals weeping or vomiting. Superpowers plan world-ending retaliation out of fear that they might be wiped out before they get a chance to fire their nukes. The President becomes overwhelmed, asking the junior aide carrying the nuclear football (Jonah Hauer-King) what he should do. (Hauer-King’s character, acknowledging the way the War Book looks like a nightmare menu, wryly confesses he calls the world-ending options rare, medium and well-done). The Deputy NSA tries everything, including begging, to get Russia to stand down, only for them to refusing to do so until US meet Russia’s own un-meetable conditions.

What we are left with is the realisation that there is no winner here. Many viewers, I feel are missing the point. Who fired the missile, who (or if) America hits back, if Chicago goes up in inferno or not, is not the point. Just firing the starting trigger in this race means you lose, because when the nuclear buttons is pressed by anyone there is no turning back, no way of unringing that bell. This is the chilling message of Bigelow’s compelling film – made all the more chilling as she finds so much humanity in the people forced to make these terrible calls.

What we end up with is a different type of coin toss: one man, in most cases with almost no preparation what-so-ever, making a decision that could go either way on virtually no conclusive information at all, in an impossibly small window, about whether to risk ending the world or not. What A House of Dynamite makes clear is that’s all nuclear deterrent really is: a coin toss for individuals who feel they have to always call heads. That’s possibly the most terrifying about it.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023)

Transformers serves away from the charm of Bumblebee back to the tedious machismo of Bay

Director: Steven Caple Jnr

Cast: Anthony Ramos (Noah Diaz), Dominique Fishback (Elena Wallace), Dean Scott Vazquez (Kris Diaz), Luna Lauren Velez (Breanna Diaz), Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime), Ron Perlman (Optimus Primal), Peter Dinklage (Scourge), Michelle Yeoh (Airazor), Pete Davidson (Mirage), Liza Koshy (Arcee), Colman Domingo (Unicron)

Somehow the Transformers franchise lucked out and managed to make a film I actually wouldn’t feel awkward showing to a child. Bumblebee avoided the crude sexualisation and graphic violence (hidden by the fact you are watching CGI engine oil and bits of metal flying around, rather than blood and bits of human flesh) of Michael Bay’s films. I really enjoyed it. I can’t really say the same about this follow-up. I’d at least let a child watch it – although it’s the cinematic equivalent of letting them have a Big Mac for dinner.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts could have continued in the tone of Bumblebee, a delightful mix of cartoon and Buster Keaton/Laurel and Hardy. Instead, it takes tiny elements of that, then mashes them up with the throw-it-all-at-the-screen style of Bay. It’s not a happy marriage, and Rise of the Beasts is tired and overly familiar, crammed with crude banter and the sort of mass smackdown we’ve seen done time-and-time again. Give me strength. Rise of the Beasts isn’t really a sequel to Bumblebee – the events of that film are referred to only in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference. The boyish charm of Bumblebee is drenched in audio clip quotes from Scarface and the like. Instead, it’s another “end of the world seconds away from a giant robot monster” flick.

Far in the future Unicorn (voiced with regal indifference by Colman Domingo), the planet eating robot from the 1985 film (when he was voiced by a final pay-cheque collecting Orson Welles) is trapped in another dimension, but wants to break into ours. He sends his minion Scourge (Peter Dinklage, dialling it in big time) to 1990s Earth to hunt down the MacGuffin that will do it. Only Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and his Autobots can stop him, allied with an ex-soldier desperately trying to help his kid brother Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) and Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) a junior archaeologist who can unearth the MacGuffin from where it has been hidden centuries ago by the Maximals, a group of transformers descended from our Autobots who transform into giant mechanical animals (their leader Optimus Primal is a Kong style ape).

It all seems a million miles away from the charm of the first film, with a teenage girl bonding with her first car who just happens to be a clumsy robot. There is precious little charm at all Rise of the Beasts. The human characters are either faintly forgettable, loud and brash or serve only as plot points. Anthony Ramos has to do a lot of digging to find any depth in a character given only a cursory plotline of desperation to provide for his mum and brother. Dominique Fishback’s archaeologist has the faintest of backstories about being cheated out of the credit for her work, before she’s fiddling with MacGuffins with handwave lines. The action zips across two universes and two continents, but never seems to really find firm grounding for itself.

There’s also something rather sad about the film swopping out the fairy tale elements of Bumblebee with a far more conventional Bro-romance. Ramos’ street-wise ex-soldier is paired up with Peter Davidson’s Mirage, a loud-mouthed Autobot who, despite a few witty lines, basically comes across as a street-wise bro with a hot streak of immaturity. There is a streak of laddish banter throughout the film – none of it, thank God, as appallingly sexist or racist as what passes for this sort of chat in Bay’s films – that essentially doubles down on restoring the franchise to something that appeals only to teenage boys and adults who wish they still were teenage boys.

After the broadening out of Bumblebee with a female lead given actual agency, this feels like a retrograde step. Rise of the Beasts does manage to pay this Bros plotline off with a surprisingly effective scene of self-sacrifice – but does so while not shirking on red-blooded (or red-oiled) young men whooping and cheering as they blast stuff out of the sky. It’s a step firmly back towards a territory that places male relationships at a premium – be it bros or actual brothers – and the bonds between men a world that leaves women on the outside looking in.

Not to mention the plot continually readjusts its stakes and characters depending on the requirements from scene to scene. Scourge is an unstoppable killing machine… until the plot requires him not to be. Characters are killed off… until the plot needs them to come back to life. Characters are fixated on their own needs… until the plot needs them to be altruistic. It combines that up with a final battle sequence that feels painfully derivative of the end of Avengers: Endgame, with Scourge mustering an army of rent-a-baddies to slow down the heroes while he slowly plugs a thingamee into a do-hickey.

Even Optimus Prime takes a backward step. While Bumblebee salvaged some likeability out of this hero, Rise of the Beasts very much returns him to Bay form: a deeply flawed leader with anger-management issues, who slices and dices foes with reckless abandon, rips off heads and uses neat kiss-off lines like “Then DIE”. I suppose he doesn’t execute at point-blank range a surrendering foe begging for mercy (Bay did this twice!) but he still hardly feels like an admirable hero. Rise of the Beasts vaguely acknowledges this by having Prime go on a loose arc of learning to put the needs of humans on a level with the Autobots (yup he’s also a proto-racist at the start) but it’s a very loose peg to hang a hero on.

Rise of the Beasts gives up on any pretensions of doing something fresh, engaging or different with the series. Even the beasts, for all their animalistic looks, are basically barely characters, more different looking toys imported into a flagging cinematic universe (Ron Perlman and Michelle Yeoh lazily yawn their way through terminal dialogue). While Bumblebee took the starting principles of the franchise and found the joy in them, Rise of the Beasts is a teenage wet dream of toys hitting each other to no great purpose, that places male relationships at its heart and leaves you with nothing to really care about. It’s a callback to everything bad about this franchise.

Twisters (2024)

It won’t blow away, but theres something reassuringly old-fashioned about Twisters

Director: Lee Isaac Chung

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones (Kate Carter), Glen Powell (Tyler Owens), Anthony Ramos (Javi), Brandon Perea (Boone), Maura Tierney (Cathy Carter), Harry Hadden-Paton (Ben), Sasha Lane (Lily), Daryl McCormack (Jeb), Kiernan Shipka (Addy), Nik Dodani (Praveen), David Corenswet (Scott)

Twisters is perhaps one of the oddest pieces of IP rebooting (as we call it these days) in years: a sideways sequel to a 1996 box-office hit that virtually no one has thought about once since it was in the cinema thirty years ago. Twisters hardly brings in a new breath of air for 2024 compared to what worked at the box-office in 1996: in fact in many ways it’s as predictable as that film was. But yet it gets away with it, because there is an old-fashioned simplicity about it, a pure ‘just wanna entertain you’ vibe throughout, combined with the fact it creates a small group of likeable characters we care about, played by winning performers. Rather like Top Gun: Maverick it takes the ideas that people liked from the first film but delivers them far more effectively with much more charm.

Meteorologist and instinctive twister spotter Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is one of the few survivors of a failed scientific experiment to use a compound foam to reduce the power of tornados, with the deceased including her boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack). Five years later she is called back into the field by her old colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) who needs her help to test his new tornado radar-scanning technology company. In Oklahoma with Javi’s team, Kate faces her fears, finds that the impact of the storms is leaving a heavy burden on the community and falls into a flirtation with rock-and-roll meteorologist and YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) whose cowboy exterior hides his heart of gold.

All this blows itself up into highly entertaining stuff, told with an old-fashioned sense of fun by Lee Isaac Chung. It’s actually a relief to find a modern blockbuster just focused on an entertaining, character-led piece of popcorn fun, rather than blowing pop-culture references, set-ups for future films and homages to hits from yesteryear, straight into your eyes. Twisters never reinvents any wheels at all, but it’s several degrees better than the forgotten film its riffing on and you’ll end up being surprisingly invested in it.

A big part of that is the charming and hugely likeable performances from its two leads. Edgar-Jones is very good at this sort of tough-edged exterior hiding inner-vulnerabilities (the team on Twisters must clearly have binged through Normal People during lockdown like the rest of us). Powell – who is having a moment and then-some – is also an absolute pro at cocksure types like this with unexpected layers. There is a sort of It Happened One Night opposites-attract screwball comedy between these two, who take each other at first for a naïve city-girl and a brainless cowboy only to find (would you believe it!) that first impressions are not always the right impressions.

However, this sort of rom-com, relationship-led stuff is exactly what makes Twisters entertaining and makes you care for it. After all, as Twister showed us, once you’ve seen wind related special effects pile on, you’ve kind of seen them all, it’s just a question of degree. Twisters front-and-centres not so much the gusty action, but the characters at the heart of it. Impressive as Chung’s staging of the blowing away of cars and the ripping up of buildings is, it works because we care about the people at cowering beneath the gale.

That’s because Twisters is told with an old-fashioned heart. There is nothing in it that really surprises you: Daryl McCormack’s prologue boyfriend has ‘doomed’ written all over him the moment he speaks and the only thing that you’ll really puzzle over is how long the post-prologue time-jump will be. Although it’s character and plot developments are well handled and endearingly delivered, there are all unsurprising. Would you believe Kate and Tyler find they have much in common? That Tyler’s blow-hard cowboy storm-chasers turn out to all have Hearts of Gold? That Javi’s loaded, Stetson-wearing tycoon sponsor is a ruthless modern-day Crassus, using the weather forecasts to snap up devastated land for tuppence? It’s just like we can be pretty certain that the twister-diluting experiment that Kate is working on in the film’s opening will come storming back in Act Five.

You could pretty much scribble down all possible plot developments over the course of the film after watching the first twenty minutes, but somehow it doesn’t really matter. Even though everything in this is completely and utterly safe and straight-forward, it’s told with such professionalism and such a sense of fun, it hardly matters. Everything in Twisters is focused on just entertaining you and not forcing you to worry or get stressed about things. Perhaps that’s why the film shies away from the questions asked around why the storms are getting worse (let’s not bring something really depressing like climate change into a breezy opposites-attract thrill ride). To balance that it does more-or-less avoid the storms making moral judgements on who gets killed off in its blustery assaults, unlike so many other disaster movies.

Twisters offers nothing really original or unique, but everything in it seems to come from the heart, like Chung wanted to make the sort of unfussy, well-meaning entertainment vehicles he watched in his youth, when it was all about sitting back, munching popcorn and leaving with a grin on your face that a film just entertained you. And at a time when the cinema seems to be full of easter-egg stuffed, self-satisfied, franchise-building bait there is an awful lot to be said for that.