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While Olympus… had Gerard Butler as a bargain-basement Bruce Willis, this throws likable rent-a-lunk Channing Tatum into the seat of American power, wherein he must save the president (Jamie Foxx, having a ball) from assorted baddies and crackpots hell-bent on increasingly bonkers acts of mindless destruction. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13."That's the building they blew up in Independence Day!" Bigger, dumberer and just a whole lot more stupid fun than the boringly straight-faced Olympus Has Fallen, this bona-fide big-budget Hollywood flop at least has the good grace to laugh at itself as it rolls out the dingbat-daft action-movie cliches. Motion Picture Association of America rating definition for PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. “White House Down,” a Columbia Pictures release, is rated PG-13 for prolonged sequences of action and violence including intense gunfire and explosions, some language and a brief sexual image. Woods, for example, gravely announces: “Killing Ted Hope was the second hardest thing I’ve had to do in my life.” If stripped of its production value, “White House Down” would make one hysterical off-Broadway one-act. Many of its biggest laughs don’t come when they’re cued up, but at the film’s attempts at emotion. But the comedy in James Vanderbilt’s screenplay only comes in spurts. If “White House Down” had pushed the farce further, Emmerich’s overlong romp could have been something special. His president is a kind of liberal fantasy version of Barrack Obama, boldly removing all troops from the Middle East, thereby sparking the fury of the Beltway’s white power players. Foxx, a more gifted comic actor, is left off-screen for large chunks. The charm of Tatum - toned but goofy - carries the film. It’s a style of blockbuster that now feels dated, like a `90s kind of big-budget moviemaking that depends on explosions, flashes of comedy and star charisma.
#WHITE HOUSE DOWN RATED MOVIE#
From there, it’s a series of chases through the handsome, recreated halls of the White House, where golden light filters in through venetian blinds but seemingly scant security measures exist.Įmmerich, the director of spectacles like “Independence Day” (a movie he references in “White House Down”) and “2012,” has made blowing up the White House something of a fetish, having already done it in both of those movies. When the Capitol dome is detonated and the White House invaded, Cale is separated from his daughter and stumbles into the kidnapping of the president. It’s an archetype defined by Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” a movie “White House Down” apes right down to the tank top. There’s some reason to believe her, since Cale (in the mold of most action heroes) is an absentee, divorced dad. But it goes poorly, partly because his would-be boss turns out to be an old flame (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who doubts he’s grown up. He’s John Cale (not to be confused with the Velvet Underground musician, although, how could you?), a Silver Star veteran of Afghanistan and a police bodyguard to the speaker of the house (Richard Jenkins).įor his Secret Service interview at the White House, he’s brought along his politics-obsessed 11-year-old daughter (the promising Joey King). He’s now reached the level that he can breeze through a blatantly silly movie and look none the worse for it. This is a kind of coronation for Tatum as a movie star. “White House Down” is most entertaining when it’s a simple, ludicrous buddy movie, with Tatum and Foxx fleeing across the White House grounds, dropping one-liners as they go, eluding a gang of assailants led by a bitter turncoat (James Woods) and his ferocious henchmen (including Jason Clarke, swapping sides in the war on terror following “Zero Dark Thirty”). Onlookers behind a fence - media, regular people, the Army - merely gape in awe, as if frozen by the idiocy. This becomes particularly crystalized somewhere around the time Foxx’s President James Sawyer and his rescuer, Channing Tatum’s wannabe secret service agent, are careening across the White House lawn in the president’s limo while terrorists shoot in pursuit.