Review: ‘White House Down’

Well here is “White House Down,” the third “John McClane” movie of 2013, and they already got beat to the punch by both “Olympus Has Fallen” (a movie for which I remembered so little that I actually had to re-read my own review there as a recap) and an actual John McClane movie in “A Good Day to Die Hard” (which is just about one of the worst movies of the year), and if you really like your “lone guy taking out a team of thieves/mercs in a singular location” movies, this is going to be your best bet.

John McClane stand-in John Cale (Channing Tatum, This is the End, Side Effects) applies for a job at the U.S. Secret Service department, and he brings along his estranged daughter Emily (Joey King, The Dark Knight Rises) to the White House for his interview, scoring her some passes because he knows she is some sort of nut for the White House and its history and he needs to bribe his way back into her life because she’s pissed at him for being a shitty father who put work before parenting (very John McClane-ish of him, by the way, Emily could easily be Lucy McClane, and there’s even the estranged wife so that completes the package).

And of course while at the White House, a terrorist attack goes down, and John finds himself separated from everyone, picking off bad guys one by one, and trying to find his daughter and also trying to save and protect President Sawyer (Jamie Foxx, Django Unchained). Meanwhile a bunch of official government types in a room look at computer screens and scream exposition at each other, letting the audience know clearly what’s going on. Because we’re all a bunch of dumb-dumbs.

But seriously, there’s a lot of shouting and plotting and an interesting use of the “maintaining continuity of government” thing with the whole succession of Commander in Chief rank to the next person in line when people are dead or incapacitated, and there are many very capable and accomplished actors doing these scenes, helping to make them work by treating the situation as seriously as possible.

But that’s only in those scenes, as John Cale has another John McClane-ish trait in how he is very quippy and makes jokes when under stress and pressure, and when he hooks up with the President some of it turns into an action buddy comedy routine, lots of jokes and humor, and much of this humor works, but maybe there was just a little too much of it. The movie ultimately presents a pretty dire situation worthy of director Roland Emmerich (Universal Soldier, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), but it does get so ridiculous and over the top that I suppose the humor is really necessary. That is a big difference between this movie and the much more dour and forgettable “Olympus Has Fallen,” and it helps it stand out from the pack a little. Jamie Foxx’s “Get your hands off my Jordans” line, which he apparently improvised, is terrible however. Let that be noted.

Also they didn’t bother developing either John Cale or President Sawyer as actual characters; Cale is confined to “screw up father” and “underachiever,” while Jamie Foxx’s President Sawyer is as bare bones as it gets, with his defining characteristic also being the main plot point and driving force behind the whole movie anyway. Their banter together is fun, but that’s really just because these guys have some good chemistry, which makes me wish I was watching the two of them in a better movie.

Most of the action is pretty forgettable, too, save for the scene in which helicopters come crashing down, around and through the White House and another scene in which they pulled off a car chase scene that never actually left the White House lawn (though it does culminate in the one of the worst CG shots in the movie, that of a CG limousine flipping 180 degrees in slow motion and splashing into a pool. Seriously. That happens in the movie. Don’t believe me? Just watch the trailer, cause they show it off like it’s some sort of awe-inspiring money shot. But it’s not. It’s a stupid obviously faked shot of a limo flipping into a pool, and it’s not even like we could see the characters inside the car as it flipped, so why not just flip a real limo into a real pool for real and just film it? I guarantee it would have been cheaper. Gaawd piss poor digital effects are so irritating.

Now really quickly I would like to applaud the filmmakers for using a movie spectacle thing like this to take aim at the military-industrial complex because fuck those guys, amiright?

Anyway, this is a decent action movie, an okay way to kill a plane ride or a rainy Sunday afternoon at home or something along those lines. Just keep your expectations down is all I’m saying, because at the end of the day it’s still nothing but a “Die Hard” knock off and everyone knows it.