In one of screenwriter James Vanderbilt’s niftier touches, Cale doesn’t spend the movie trying to rescue Sawyer but rather on the run with the president, looking for Emily and plotting their escape.
It’s a sturdy, old-fashioned bit of escapism that keeps delivering the goods and finds its own small ways of toying with our expectations. That an about-to-retire Secret Service chief is also mixed up in this will come as a surprise only to those who miss the character’s introductory scene ―glowering into the camera as he removes an Old Glory lapel pin and tells his wife he’ll “be home late” tonight ― or who have never before seen the actor playing said role: James Woods.īut “White House Down” isn’t really selling novelty or invention. What comes to light relatively early, in a modestly provocative twist on the usual terrorist m.o., is that they’re all disgruntled Americans with ideological axes to grind, including an ex-CIA contractor who did “black bag” work in Pakistan, played in a sly bit of casting by head “Zero Dark Thirty” interrogator Jason Clarke. Just what these particular bad guys are after is something “White House Down” reveals gradually, with a few red herrings along the way.
When she insists they stick around for an official White House tour, he reluctantly agrees, which is right around the time that all hell breaks loose. (One more doubter to disprove!)Īdding insult to injury, Cale has brought his president-obsessed daughter, Emily ( Joey King), along for the day in a touching effort to convince her he isn’t a total failure. Cale has come for a job interview to join the president’s Secret Service team ― an idea of which he is quickly disabused by Special Agent Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a former college classmate who rattles off a detailed inventory of Cale’s lifelong failure to live up to his potential. Just as a certain John McClane found himself in a Los Angeles office building at the exact moment of a brazen hostage taking, so too does Cale turn up at the White House in the hours before some suspicious-looking home-theater repairmen drop their A/V equipment and break out the big guns (something, it must be said, that the pic makes look so easy, you can’t help wondering if the prez left the keys to the front door under the mat).
Strict narrative logicians be forewarned: The cheerfully preposterous coincidences pile up in “ White House Down” faster than the body count. Somewhere in those same years, Cale’s personal life went bust, leaving him with an ex-wife and moody preteen kid to try to win back - an outcome, in the grand scheme of movies like this, that can often be hastened by some extravagant act of heroism. During one of them, he saved the life of a fellow soldier whose uncle happens to be the speaker of the House (Richard Jenkins), earning Cale his current job as a Capitol policeman assigned to the speaker’s security detail. Tatum’s John Cale, by contrast, has done his time in the trenches ― three tours of duty in Afghanistan, to be precise. troops from the Middle East has ruffled more than a few feathers in the military-industrial Complex. He’s also, in the words of one Tea Party-ish detractor, “an academic who never served a day in his life,” and his controversial plan to withdraw all U.S. SEE MORE: Roland Emmerich Again Bets the ‘House’Įmmerich also offers the screen’s most overtly Obama-esque commander-in-chief to date in the form of Foxx’s James Sawyer, a self-styled Lincolnian who gets his kicks from buzzing the Lincoln Memorial in Marine One and even carries a pocket watch that once belonged to Honest Abe himself. Relatively speaking, the new pic is shrewder politically, too, giving us an enemy from within America’s own borders in place of “Olympus’” central-casting North Korean baddies. Petruccelli’s enormously impressive replica set to the visual effects by longtime Emmerich collaborators Volker Engel (an Oscar winner for “Independence Day”) and Marc Weigert. Setting aside the question of whether the world really needed a second White House takeover movie, in terms of sheer craftsmanship and professionalism, “ White House Down” is to “Olympus Has Fallen” what “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was to the 1985 Richard Chamberlain-Sharon Stone version of “King Solomon’s Mines.” Though both pics were majority shot far from the actual Beltway ― “Olympus” in Louisiana and “White House” in Montreal ― Emmerich’s film is a far better sell, from production designer Kirk M.