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The outcome may be pre-ordained, but Emmerich’s knack for a witty pop-culture reference, a pulse-pounding gun battle or a sneaky political undercurrent (the film has drawn fire in the US for being leftie propaganda) hasn’t deserted him. Channing Tatum plays John Cale (not that one, music geeks), a wannabe Secret Service agent whose job interview goes spectacularly off the rails when terrorists attack the White House and take the president (Jamie Foxx) hostage.
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But if all you’re after is a pair of mismatched heroes wisecracking their way through a series of explosive, well-mounted set pieces, look no further.
‘White House Down’ doesn’t have the slightest interest in reinventing the action genre.
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So thank the movie gods for Roland ‘Independence Day’ Emmerich, one of the last Hollywood filmmakers who still knows what the people want, and how to give it to them. By the time Sawyer shoulders a rocket-propelled grenade in the limo, the viewer’s reaction is less likely to be surprise than glazed, benumbed indifference.It’s been a lamentable summer at the multiplex: inferior sequels, unwanted remakes and lazy adaptations have been the order of the day. White House Down is a 2013 American action thriller film directed by Roland Emmerich and written by James Vanderbilt.In the film, a divorced US Capitol Police officer named John Cale attempts to rescue both his daughter Emily and the President of the United States James Sawyer when a massively destructive terrorist assault occurs in the White House. With effects extravaganzas like “ Iron Man 3,” “ Star Trek Into Darkness” and “ Man of Steel” already in theaters, the carnage of “White House Down” takes on the air of something disposable and utterly meaningless. (All the while, disas-tourists swarm the South Lawn as if they were clamoring to get into the Easter Egg Roll.) “White House Down,” written by James Vanderbilt and directed by Roland Emmerich (who, having also made “ Independence Day” and “ 2012,” clearly has a fetish for destroying 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.), takes perverse glee in putting its human and architectural characters through an increasingly barbaric series of physical punishments, from that shocking blow suffered by a cute, tear-stained child to the Green Room literally going up in flames. That film, of course, starred Aaron Eckhart and Gerard Butler in an eerily similar story that, although often just as outlandish, looks in retrospect like a quiet, sophisticated little thriller. Capitol and shortly thereafter at the White House, an aspiring Secret Service agent named John Cale (Tatum) happens to be taking a tour of the latter with his daughter soon, the men are playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, outmaneuvering their shadowy opponents and outgunning inevitable comparisons to “ Olympus Has Fallen.” President James Sawyer, Foxx plays a more bespectacled, less formal version of President Obama, his Nicorette gum and basketball shoes chiming unsubtly with Sawyer’s real-life counterpart. government suffers a viciously violent coup.
As they go into the house they start droping off one by one untill there is one person left. If cognitive dissonance ensues for an audience unsure whether to laugh or wince, that’s nothing compared to the level of sheer volume - and preposterousness - the film inevitably reaches for with its we-can-top-that finale.īetween all the stuff that goes boom, stars Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum manage to develop genuine comic chemistry as two men thrown into an apocalyptic cataclysm when the U.S. A group of young friends are dared to go into the neighorhood haunted house by the popular jocks at the school. At least that seems to be the aim in a film that, in the midst of sadistic violence, throws in jokes and bits of buddy humor as blithely as its protagonists toss those grenades.
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A riotous display of serial explosions, helicopter crashes, car smash-ups, sniper attacks and at least one slap on the face of a winsome little girl, “White House Down” is the kind of celebration of rampant mayhem in which everyone seems to have a rocket launcher - or at least a live hand grenade - at the ready, just in case they need to dispatch a scrum of exceptionally vile and cruel villains.īut “White House Down” also clearly wants to be a lighthearted comedy. “ White House Down” never quite seems to decide what kind of movie it wants to be, although by firepower alone it qualifies as this summer’s most cartoonishly bombastic exercise in sensory overload (so far).