When the White House is taken over by a group of administration insiders and white supremacists, it falls to John Cale (Channing Tatum) to save President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) and the world.
I really like this movie but time and repeat viewings have laid bare things that do not work (or are just out of date).
When I first watched the movie, my hot take was that it felt like an action movie from 1996.
1996 is the year that Independence Day came out, and it is also dead centre in the middle of the nineties economic boom. There is a sense of optimism and non-winking flag-waving that feels totally of the time - completely divorced from reality and superficial in its understanding of how American democracy works.
It is also awash in the faux observational one-liners that its director’s movies are famous for - not particularly funny asides that are supposed to offset whatever serious business is going on.
In 2013, I took these elements as part of the deal - I rolled my eyes at some of the gags and ignored the naive optimism of its portrayal of Washington DC.
I remember thinking the film’s focus on far right activists overtaking the White House because of the policies of a Black president was a dramatic escalation of what was simmering in the far right space during the Obama years.
In 2022, this element of the film has probably aged the best - I cannot say the same for the film’s tone.
As the blockbusters of the 90s seems hopelessly naive in the new millennium, this movie suffers from a similar sugary idealism that feels completely insulated from reality.
The best parts of the film are the script (by James Vanderbilt) and the cast.
The script is a solid Die Hard clone - Olympus Has Fallen has the tone and the R-rating but I was more onboard with the story of White House Down.
Tatum’s character is your familiar flawed action hero who becomes a better person by taking licks and killing dozens of people. Every other character feels like they contribute to the story, and the film’s twists provide a slight riposte to the film’s gilded view of American power structures.
The script is better than the movie, and to their credit the filmmakers do not mess around with it, at least in terms of the structure or characterisation. lt is all familiar stuff, but it is executed with originality and wit.
And while its portrayal of American institutions is lacquered in sentiment, it does not feel as faux-ironic as the filmmaker’s other films. The filmmakers seem to recognise the strength of the script and so the familiar observational jokes and one-liner-spewing side characters are kept to a minimum.
Craft-wise, the filmmaking is clean and clear, with little of the shaky handheld camera or over-cutting. In contrast to Olympus, which takes place in near-darkness, White House Down takes place in daylight. This distinction makes it feel even more like a relic from the mid-nineties.
The acting by the key cast is solid: Tatum is great as Cale - he balances the stakes and the goofiness without negating either, and he has a good rapport with Foxx.
Jamie Foxx is a tad too studied as the earnest Sawyer, particularly in the early section of the film, where he leans hard into evoking Obama’s vocal and physical specifics. It is a strange performance at first, almost as if the filmmakers wanted to fix in the viewer’s mind the connections with the real-life president. Once his introduction is over, that sense of impersonation dissipates.
As with Tatum, he handles the film’s tone, underplaying the various gags and foregrounding the character’s empathy. The idea that any president would want to go against decades of US foreign policy is laughable, but Foxx makes Sawyer’s earnestness believable. I cannot understand how someone like him could make it through a primary without hiding his hand, but for this story, I buy it.
James Woods is great as the film’s villain - the script gives him clear motivations which differentiate him from the financial imperatives of other villains in this film. Even at the time it was impossible to not see the film as a comment on Woods’ trajectory, but now it just feels like an obvious in-joke and a blast of reality.
The MVP of the movie, and the element that makes it unique in Die Hard terms, is Cale’s relationship with his daughter, played by Joey King. Kids in action movies can be a bad sign, but Emily is a smart character who contributes to bringing down the villain. Her dad may kill people but she foils their plan and ultimately saves the day with the only flag-waving scene I cannot roll my eyes at.
King’s performance is not winsome or one-note - her skepticism at her dad avoids feeling cliche and the character’s obsession with the history of the White House never feels like a joke.
I have not watched anything else King has been in, but she is making a return to action this year with two films, The Princess and Bullet Train. Look out for reviews of those films soon.
White House Down is an underrated flick. Its failure at the box office and the success of the Mike Bannon franchise have done the most to bury it, but it is not the disaster that some people make it out to be. If you can stomach its idealized view of the American presidency, on its own terms it is a fun time.
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