White House Down gives Roland Emmerich a chance to blow up another city. Having taken down New York, Paris, Tokyo, and the entire globe (in 2012), Emmerich sets his sights on DC and the White House this time. White House Down takes a standard Emmerich plot that gives Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx a chance to kick some butt. Sure there are some pretty ludicrous action pieces and the character development is obvious, but it doesn’t matter if the explosions are cool and the patriotism is ratcheted up to 11. White House Down knows what it is and delivers on exactly what Olympus Has Fallen did earlier in 2012 but with more Channing Tatum/Jamie Fox and less Gerard Butler.
Things are tense in the United States. President Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) is proposing a big peace treaty across the Middle East, creating tension with the head of his Secret Service (James Woods and Maggie Gyllenhaal) and the Speaker of the House (Richard Jenkins). The Speaker’s security is John Cale (Channing Tatum), who tries to impress his daughter Emily (Joey King) by scoring a White House visit. Bad timing for John and Emily though: an insurrection of the White House has begun what might be the start of something bigger for the Unites States as a whole.
Like many other Roland Emmerich movies, characters make stupid decisions for the sake of moving the story forward; in White House Down, it appears Emmerich has learned from some of his previous efforts. When a gun is pointed at a character, the character surrenders instead of getting shot since they have no other play: smart. However, John spends most of the movie trying to save his lost daughter, and on a couple of instances, he chooses the President over her for no especially good reason. The eye roll quotient on plot contrivances is mostly relegated to the special effects.
Boy are there some crazy scenes near the White House. The chase scene on the White House lawn is illogical with just the amount of bullets shot at the car and not one hitting either Fox or Tatum. It is pretty fun though, lots of fun explosions and car flips. The helicopter crashes seem realistic and are executed well. Unfortunately, the fight scenes are nothing too special even though they are usually pretty easy to follow. The best effect is the realization of the White House under siege, which Emmerich has done before.
The screenplay plays up the conspiracy angle and battles over what are probably the more intriguing stories: the government response in a crisis. The segmenting of power and the use of the 25th amendment gets invoked several times. Decision making could be used with the President fighting with his own government more often to create some very tense realistic situations when terrorism hits. However, Emmerich keeps politics and action separate thus relying on the cover-up part of the story whose conclusion becomes evident right at the beginning of the story. White House down leaves more on the table than taking off it.
Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum do their thing in their roles. Tatum gets to kick some ass; Fox gets to shoot a rocket launcher and deliver some cool speeches. Both of them appear in on the joke. Little Joey King carries the heart of the story well (something Emmerich does in his films, put hope in the hands of a child). Maggie Gyllenhaal is there to brood and be a powerful woman mostly. James Woods gets some development behind his villainy, and Richard Jenkins and Jason Clarke are mostly brooding in the background and wasted. The only other character of note is Nicholas Wright who gets the best lines in the film as a tour guide trapped in the White House.
White House Down joins its brothers Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 in the Emmerich summer movie genre, where the tongue is planted firmly in cheek and actions sequences and explosions have a nice level of grandeur. It will never rise too high, but it usually delivers the goods. Roland Emmerich will never be among the ranks of Scorsese or Spielberg, but he will always entertain in dumb fun ways.