White House Down (2013)
Movie rating: 7/10
One of the odd recurring trends in Hollywood is how every few years, studios will release two movies with very similar premises within months of each other. In 1997, we saw duelling volcano films Dante’s Peak and Volcano. In 1998, it was twin movies about an asteroid hitting Earth, Deep Impact and Armageddon. In 2012, execs bet big on Snow White with Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman. The following year, audiences got to compare two variations of “Die Hard in the White House”: Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down.
I watched Olympus Has Fallen a few years ago and enjoyed it for the dumb, throwback action movie it was. White House Down is entertaining for the same reasons. It’s hard to say which I liked more. The biggest difference between the two movies — other than the former is rated R, while the latter is a more tame PG-13 — is political. Olympus Has Fallen is the conservative version of this story, centred around a foreign threat in the form of North Korean terrorists. White House Down is the liberal version, with President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) clearly an idealized fantasy version of Barack Obama, right down to the Air Jordans and chewing Nicorette to quit smoking. Rather than foreign enemies, the villains here are domestic, comprised mainly of far-right mercenaries and at least one turncoat from within the government.
The similarities to Die Hard are even more obvious in White House Down, right down to the dirty wife-beater that protagonist John Cale (Channing Tatum) ends up wearing by the end. Part of this movie’s charm is how much it sticks to that tried-and-true formula. Director Roland Emmerich has spent most of his career since Independence Day trying to recreate that movie’s success in endless disaster flicks featuring the destruction of famous landmarks. But White House Down is perfectly suited to Emmerich’s talents as an auteur of lunkheaded, crowd-pleasing summer blockbusters with clichéd stock characters and a heavy dose of rah-rah patriotism.
Every trope of the genre is here. We have an everyman hero with the standard action-hero name “John”: an Afghanistan war veteran that bravely rescued a fellow soldier who also happens to be the nephew of Speaker of the House Eli Raphaelson (Richard Jenkins). Cale is a Capitol police officer whose daughter, Emily (Joey King) resents him because he missed her performance in the school talent recital. He applies for a job with the Secret Service, but is rejected due to his poor grades and lack of post-secondary education. His résumé literally states that “Sgt. Cale demonstrates a lack of respect for authority” and “Sgt. Cale has raw potential, but seems determined not to realize it.” These sound like notes from a Screenwriting 101 course.
Emily, of course, happens to have an obsessive interest in the White House and politics. Cale tries to impress his daughter by getting her tickets to tour the White House, which naturally takes place at the very moment a paramilitary team is preparing to seize the building and take the president hostage. When father and daughter are separated during the attack, Emily becomes one of the hostages. Will Cale redeem himself by saving his daughter and regaining her respect? Will he rescue the president and work together with Sawyer to defeat the terrorists who have taken over the White House? Will this improve his career prospects with the Secret Service? The answers might surprise you if you’ve never seen a movie in your life.
Jamie Foxx’s President Sawyer is, of course, one of those idealized movie presidents: basically Obama as liberals imagine him to be, mixed with some Abraham Lincoln and Jimmy Carter. Sawyer’s actions are so removed from any real U.S. president that it becomes laughable. As the movie starts, Sawyer has signed a peace agreement to remove all U.S. military forces from the Middle East. Wow! That certainly sounds like something the leader of a global military empire that has killed tens of millions of people since World War II would do. It’s particularly funny when you compare Sawyer to Obama, who waged war in seven countries and dropped so many bombs in the Middle East that the U.S. military literally ran out of bombs. Sawyer is also deeply concerned with poverty, education, etc. — but actually, not just in rhetoric.
And you know what? That’s fine. This is a dumb summer blockbuster directed by Roland Emmerich, and this kind of glorified, ass-kicking, one-liner-spouting movie president is par for the course. President Sawyer joins the ranks of my favourite ridiculous action-movie presidents along with Harrison Ford in Air Force One and Bill Pullman in Independence Day. It’s hilarious watching the president of the United States pull out a rocket launcher in the presidential limousine and blast mercenaries who are chasing him on the White House lawn. We also get a particularly masterful example of the one F-bomb allowed in a PG-13 movie, when Sawyer tells the lead villain: “As the President of the United States, this comes with the full weight, power and authority of my office: fuck you.”
I had a lot of fun with this flick. It’s stupid, cornball, formulaic, predictable, and that’s why I liked it. Even if it goes on a bit too long, Emmerich fits in all the explosions, car chases, fight scenes, landmark destruction, and one-liners you could ask for in a movie like this. This is the kind of movie where the character arc of a White House tour guide starts with him concerned about damage to vintage artifacts, and ends with him bludgeoning a terrorist to death with a German mantle clock while yelling, “Stop … hurting … my … White House!” Sublime.
