Review of White House Down (2013) by Nick O — 21 Jan 2014

Maybe it was my bottom-of-the-Sarlacc Pitt-level expectations. Or maybe it was just Channing Tatum in a tank top. Either way much to my surprise, I did not completely despise "White House Down". I actually even kind of liked it. I know. After a while I gave in to its utter stupidity, something which I NEVER let a movie off the hook for asking the audience to submit to. Roland Emmerich doing a satire of the prototypical modern disaster movie he himself helped pioneer shouldn't work. Thing is, I don't really credit him so much. I think this is coolly filmed and all, but Emmerich is no auteur or visual innovator. He's like the teetering-polarity bastard child of Michael Bay and Brett Ratner.

No, I think "White House Down" is scribe James Vanderbilt -- go-to comic book/action/murder mystery ("Zodiac", goddamn) screenwriter since the early 2000s -- letting loose and poking fun at Hollywood's back-catalog of thrillers whose stakes often tower at DEFCON 5, where tent pole studios hire stars like Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx to dupe us into thinking bigger is better because it's more expensive. Not true. I watched this from the comfort of my home and not on the big screen where it probably should have been seen, if at all (though last summer's box office receipts prove my theory wrong), but like Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" I'd imagine "White House Down" is an efficient-enough time waster for when it's hot outside and every movie theater has supple AC ventilation.

Again, there's no getting around this is all incredibly dumb. But at least it isn't "Olympus Has Fallen" self-serious. Which, yeah, most things sound significantly better in comparison to Melissa Leo getting her face beaten to a pulp. If bullshit could ever be considered cosmopolitan, it's "White House Down". (58/100).