White House Down Review

21st Jan 2014

Roland Emmerich takes a step back from trying to destroy the world, and instead focuses purely on the white house itself in 2013’s second Commander in Chief as Damsel in Distress movie of the year after Olympus Has Fallen.

This time round the Service Agent trying to save the day is played by Channing Tatum, and PROTUS by Jamie Foxx. It seems once again that on a fairly ordinary day at the office, that a group (armed tom the teeth) of anti-establishment offenders have snuck in and soon start eliminating office personnel: Their goal in mind to capture the president and to gain access to nuclear arms.

Of course, they just so happened on the day that Channing Tatum’s affable lunk decided to visit the White house with his daughter in tow. So under fire he has to rescue not her, but the President himself – and all manner of architecture, grounds work, gardening and collectables are smashed, plummeted, torn and shredded up before our very eyes in the name of spectacle!

The film starts off with some of the most trite dialogue and cheesy character building ever committed to a big budget spectacle. But once the tone settle in you get used to it with only the odd shoe-horned in dumb joke making viewing a bit queasy. As per the 12 ratting, the film also treats us to a stand out use of the F-Bomb that should give audiences a good giggle.

Despite looking quite aged, James Woods turns in another silver tongued routine, Jason Clarke is decent as the leader of the troops invading the President’s soil, and get’s into more than one decent punch up with Tatum. In the background outside of the action is your usual head count of supporting actors grabbing a paycheck. Olympus Has Fallen had Morgan Freeman and Angela Basset, White House Down has Richard Jenkins, Maggie Gyllenhaal and various other familiar faces. As per Emmerich’s films there is a colourful cast of light hearted but only skin deep characters.

The battle though between the films is won here as it goes the extra mile to be all the more surprising as well as endeavouring to give some truly wild spectacle. This is still guilty pleasure territory, but at least there is still lots of pleasure to be had.