Plot
While on a tour of the White House with his young daughter, a Capitol policeman springs into action to save his child and protect the president from a heavily armed group of paramilitary invaders.
Release Year: 2013
Rating: 6.2/10 (2,239 voted)
Director:Roland Emmerich
Storyline
Capitol Policeman John Cale has just been denied his dream job with the Secret Service of protecting President James Sawyer. Not wanting to let down his little girl with the news, he takes her on a tour of the White House, when the complex is overtaken by a heavily armed paramilitary group. Now, with the nation's government falling into chaos and time running out, it's up to Cale to save the president, his daughter, and the country.
Forever etching his name on the 'blacklist' of the highest office in
Washington, Roland Emmerich is back at destroying the official
residence of the President of the United States. Alas, Emmerich has
been beaten at his own game, his White House under siege premise coming
less than six months after the similarly-themed 'Olympus Has Fallen'.
Besides cast and character, both are essentially variations of the same
movie - or to sum it up succinctly, 'Die Hard' on 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue. And having lost the novelty factor to 'Olympus', what matters
is only whether it is in fact a better movie than its predecessor, to
which our answer is unfortunately a resounding no.
Yes, despite a bigger budget and perhaps more bankable lead stars
(Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx are still surer box-office bets than
Gerard Butler going by their respective track records), 'White House
Down' is a disappointing letdown. To be fair, that ain't the fault of
Tatum and Foxx, both of whom are the saving graces of an otherwise
embarrassing exercise in hokum; instead, Emmerich and his screenwriter
James Vanderbilt are squarely to blame here, the latter for throwing
any semblance of logic out the window and the former for trying too
hard to emulate Michael Bay.
Whereas 'Olympus' had the real-life threat of the North Koreans to lend
some authenticity, Vanderbilt engenders none with his far-fetched
premise of the President's Head of Secret Service, Walker (James
Woods), recruiting a hodgepodge bunch of right-wing ex-military
fundamentalists to kidnap the President and exploit his nuclear arsenal
so as to wipe out America's enemies in the Middle East (here's looking
at you, Teheran) off the map. The trigger for that? A G8 speech where
current President, James Sawyer (Foxx), essentially tells the world
that the U.S. will be pursuing peace diplomacy by taking the first step
to lay down its weapons.
Despite a backstory that tries to explain Walker's motivations, there
is little coherence to just how the Head of the President's Secret
Service detail would be so compelled to attempt such an act of treason,
let alone assemble a ragtag team of militarists with past criminal
records and sneak them into the White House to aid his 'noble' cause.
Ditto for the likelihood that a hacker, however brilliant he might be,
could simply run a programme to crack the NSA's firewalls without even
so much as alerting anyone else in the process - and may we add thereby
precipitating a thoroughly laughable chain of swearing-ins that goes
from the Vice-President to the Speaker of Parliament Raphelson (Richard
Jenkins). If you thought 'Olympus' was just implausible, then 'White
House Down' pretty much operates on its own system of reasoning.
Further turning the proceedings to farce is the buddy team of aspiring
Secret Service agent John Cale (Tatum) and President Sawyer. A classic
case of the right guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, Cale finds
himself rising to the call of duty when the terrorists launch their
attack just as he and his daughter Emily (Joey King) are on tour in the
White House. But instead of repeating the formula of one man saving the
day (or the President for that matter), Vanderbilt introduces a twist
to the dynamics between Cale and Sawyer by turning them into partners -
though how much it really does veer from the earlier cliché is
questionable.
Nonetheless, Tatum and Foxx make a pleasantly amusing pair and are -
truth be told - the best things that the movie has going for it. But
the immediate trade-off of injecting comedy into a premise that
intuitively demands a certain degree of solemnity is that you cannot
quite take anything else that happens in it seriously afterwards.
Nowhere is this more evident than in an utterly ludicrous sequence
where Cale and Sawyer are in the President's limousine driving round
and round the fountain in the middle of the White House lawn while
being chased by the bad guys, the sheer stupidity of it matched by the
fact that Sawyer is in the meantime figuring out how to assemble a mini
rocket launcher in the back seat.
Whereas 'Olympus' kept its pacing taut by emphasising the gravity of
the threat facing the nation, there is nary a frisson of tension even
as Walker comes dangerously close to acquiring the President's nuclear
commandership. Simply put, the self-aware humour that is the only
reason why the movie remains watchable sits at odds with the
self-serious tone in the last third of the film, and no number of
fighter planes nor surface-to-air missiles can regain the credibility
of its premise.
It doesn't help that the action, which consists largely of close combat
fights, is surprisingly lacklustre, choreographed with neither finesse
nor technique to distinguish one from the other. Wherever Emmerich gets
the opportunity in the screenplay to stage the action against a wider
canvas, he squanders that chance to make it count, the surfeit of CGI
and excess making for a toxic combination that renders what is shown
little more than an afterthought. Indeed, a similar sequence as that in
'Olympus' where the Special Forces attempt to land on the roof of the
White House from helicopters unfolds with so little excitement that it
might as well have been cut out altogether.
Therein lies perhaps the biggest problem with 'White House Down' - even
as a summer popcorn flick, it just isn't thrilling enough. Emmerich
tries to keep every frame busy - hence the countless number of times
Tatum leaps over couches or slides over tables - but the action is just
loud, dumb and plain boring. Only the humour between Tatum and Foxx
manages to be entertaining, though it's hard not to regard the movie as
farce afterwards. Call us biased, but we like our White House under
siege thrillers to be hard-hitting, intense and gripping, none of which
can be used to describe 'White House Down'.
0