John Cale (Channing Tatum), an Iraq War veteran, has come back from being a soldier to guarding the current Speaker of the House Ralpheson (Richard Jenkins). He usually this proximity to the White House to get an interview for a position of President Sawyer's (Jamie Foxx) security detail. This job would go quite a long way to winning the favor of his daughter Emily (Joey King), a tech-savvy teenager who has a passion for politics and American history. Cale, seeing an opportunity to make up for missing a recent talent show, takes Emily with him to the interview for the position. Shortly after the interview, chaos erupts as a group of terrorists run by Emil Stanz (Jason Clarke) and aided by the current Head of the Presidential Detail Martin Walker (James Woods) with a plot to make the country pay for the human costs of wars. Cale must protect the President, save his daughter, and hopefully walk out of the White House alive and with a job.
One of the sure-fire signs of a bad script is when good actors can't deliver lines. While Tatum might not be seen as a "good actor", he definitely has been able to get through recent films like "21 Jump Street" utilizing his charm. Foxx won an Oscar for his performance in "Ray". In "White House Down" both actors are forced to say lines so awkward and poorly written that they simply can't say them like a real human being. There are some lines in this movie that almost echo the same "so horrible that you are laughing" dialogue of movies like "The Happening". When a terrorist is seen killing his tenth person in 30 minutes and someone yells "You are going to go to jail for that!", the audience can't help but laugh. Lines like this and several others completely pull you out of the "brain off" mentality that we must employ with summer action movies here. It feels like a first-draft screenplay that was rushed into production. The actors simply took the paychecks and delivered the nails-on-a-chalkboard dialogue.
For such a large budget film, "White House Down" feels extremely limited in scope. A tour guide at the beginning of the movie goes on and on about the size and intricacies of the White House. When our heroes spend a good third of the movie trapped in an elevator shaft, this does nothing to make us think that the set designers or screenwriter had anything more than a cursory glance at what the White House actually looks like. Almost all shots of the Washington DC area are CGI messes where airplanes and helicopters fly around as if they were cut scenes from a 1990s CD-ROM game. "Olympus Has Fallen", this year's other film involving an agent protecting the president during a terrorist uprising on the White House, felt like a much bigger movie and yet was filmed with half the budget. If you are going to make an event film, you need to offer us more than we would see on the first portion of the White House tour.
Emmerich has made a career out of blowing up CGI cities in his films like "Independence Day", "The Day After Tomorrow", "Godzilla", and "2012". He proves here that he may have a grasp on orchestrating digital destruction but that he can't film shoot-outs, hand-to-hand combat, or any other mainstays of action films. The action scenes are choppy and poorly edited to a point where you almost don't have a clue what is going on. The PG-13 rating may have gone a long way to nurturing the action scenes but watching a man just slump over bloodlessly after being shot by a car-mounted machine gun is unbelievable. It pulls you out of the moment and takes away "the money shot" that is so often wanted and often promised in action films.
While "Olympus Has Fallen" featured a child actor who actually helps the plot, the character of Emily is every teenage stereotype we have seen in bad event films. She texts Cale even though he is sitting right next to her. She snaps at her father for calling her YouTube channel "a blog". Her voice mail message is her sassily asking "Why aren't you texting me?". She is a screenwriter misconception of what a ridiculous and technologically-driven teenager would actually look like. As a result, Emily is not only unlikable and annoying but she doesn't even feel like a real person. She doesn't advance the plot beyond the prerequisite terrorist kidnapping that is meant to only further fuel Cale's rage.
There are moments of "White House Down" that are so unintentionally hilarious that I almost have to give it the slightest of recommendations based on that. Overall though, it is a film devoid of any surprises or action that makes the audience feel cheated. It is as empty and unfilling as the popcorn this movie hopes you will be so engrossed in eating that you won't notice they have completely giving up on trying to surprise an audience.
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