White House Down (Roland Emmerich, 2013)

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I really like this movie but time and repeat viewings have laid bare things that do not work (or are just out of date).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. 

The Saint (Philip Noyce, 1997)

Simon Templar (Val Kilmer) is a world-renowned thief who makes a lucrative living stealing industrial secrets. 

One of these jobs puts him in the crosshairs of Russian oligarch Ivan Tretiak (Rade Šerbedžija), who wants him dead.

To draw him out, Tretiak dangles a job with a massive payday.

The job requires Templar to steal the formula for cold fusion from an eccentric scientist, Dr. Emma Russell (Elisabeth Shue).

One thing Templar does not plan for is falling in love with his target.

Soon the pair are on the run from Tretiak, while he enacts a scheme to bring Russia to its knees… 

I have never read any of Leslie Chateris’s books or the Roger Moore TV series - thus the 1997 iteration of The Saint is the version the name conjures.

This is one of those movies that I watched several times as a kid. I have not seen it in years but I can remember huge chunks of it.

I was worried it would not stand up on this viewing, but I think this is the most I have enjoyed it.

Noyce has a sure hand with these kind of thriller mechanics.

There is none of the process or focus on family drama of the Jack Ryan movies, but Noyce has a no-frills approach that makes the ridiculousness come off.

With its supervillain and charming anti-hero, the movie is closer to the globe-trotting of Bond.

While I had never considered it before, it made me wonder what Noyce’s Bond movie would look like. 

With years of distance, this film’s proximity to Bond is even more clear - ironic, considering Bond’s debt to Templar.

This movie was released two years after the Bond franchise relaunched, and it feels like an attempt at a similar franchise, with a few key differences: While he travels the world and seduces women, Kilmer’s Templar is a master of disguise and he avoids violence. 

Strengthening the connection is the fact that The Saint is a GoldenEye reunion of sorts - cinematographer Phil Meheux and editor Terry Rawlings carry over. 

Ironically, the element which felt the most Bondian is the score by Graeme Revell.

Combining orchestra and electronica, it is contemporary without feeling locked to it’s time. It gives the movie a sweep and sense of romanticism that the movie needs. It throws in a few stings of The Saint theme, but they are not the backbone of the movie.

With hindsight the most interesting aspect of the film is watching Templar as a representation of Kilmer himself - someone who is always wanting to play other people but when stripped of a disguise he is a blank. 

Kilmer is having a great time, and his various characterisations are a big part of the movie’s appeal.

What also helps is the chemistry he shares with Elisabeth Shue.

On paper this story is a pile of hokum - nothing wrong with that because it is all in the execution.

Shue plays Dr Russell as a nerd - she comes across as slightly distracted and eccentric. She manages to make this character - and her attraction to the mysterious Templar - work.

Heck, if Kilmer and Shue were not playing these characters, the movie would not work.

The villains’ plot draws on the nineties obsession with post-Glasnost Russia. With two decades distance, this aspect of the plot is both relevant (the villain is a billionaire oligarch who wants to make Russia great again) and naive (the level of trust Templar’s final scheme depends upon is ridiculous). 

Rade Šerbedžija is great as the villain. He is such a familiar face from my childhood, and it is always fun when he pops up in things. He brings a charm and ruthlessness to what could have been a cardboard villain.

The movie falters in the third act - it was re-shot and recut late in the day, and it feels slightly undercooked. 

It is not dire, but it feels like the movie is trying to set up an arc for the Saint to find his own identity. Ending with the thief giving up a fortune for altruistic reasons is fine, but it lacks the punch that was perhaps intended.

Still, while the ending is damp, the journey makes The Saint worth a look.

The Ghost and the Darkness (Stephen Hopkins, 1996)

 Engineer John Henry Patterson (Val Kilmer) has been sent to Africa on a special mission - to oversee the building of a bridge in Tsavo, Kenya.

Soon after he arrives, the workers’ camp is attacked by a pair of man-eating lions.

Despite Patterson’s efforts, the lions continue their attacks around the camp.

 As work on the bridge falls behind, Patterson’s backers enlist a famous hunter, Remington (Michael Douglas), to kill the lions.

Will the pair be able to end the menace? Or will the lions make dinner out of the colonizers? 

I watched the third act of this movie over twenty years ago and it always stuck with me.

Every time I saw or heard the title, the same images would flash across my brain: Patterson (Val Kilmer) running toward his wife (Emily Mortimer) as a lion attacks her; Patterson discovering Remington’s (Michael Douglas) body; Patterson scrabbling for his gun as the wounded lion crawls toward him.

Even though I had never seen the whole thing, The Ghost and the Darkness existed in the same childhood nightmare space as Jaws.

The Ghost and the Darkness is based on a true story. Screenwriter William Goldman refracts these events through the Jaws narrative template, by focusing on Patterson and a fictional hunter (ala Robert Shaw’s Quint) hunting the killers down. 

While I have seen some criticism of his Irish accent, that is the least of my problems with Val Kilmer’s performance. To his credit, he underplays that aspect of the character.

More importantly, Kilmer seems lost as the straight-shooting Patterson. I have not read Goldman’s script, but it feels like he should have leaned more into the Jaws template and made Patterson more of an everyman ala Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider).

Kilmer would make more sense if Patterson was more weak-willed. The movie might have worked if Kilmer underwent more of a breakdown as the lions’ rampage continues. There is a flatness to his portrayal that throws the movie off.

Michael Douglas was - according to Goldman - poorly cast as Remington. The screenwriter envisioned the character as more of a mythical figure, an almost supernatural figure whose sudden death would increase the stakes as an unprepared Patterson has to take charge.

Goldman felt Douglas could not play that kind of role, and said the star demanded rewrites to make the character more human. I can see his point.

Like Kilmer, Douglas is always at best in roles that play against his looks, particularly as greedy, immoral villains. Consciously or not, his whole persona is a revisionist take on traditional images of white American masculinity. 

Remington is meant to be an archetypal white hunter, a white man who has mastered the terrain. Goldman intended this character as a misdirect - Remington is not the expert he is set up as, and he ends up catnip.

I am not convinced Douglas is as poor a fit as Goldman thought.

Douglas brings more energy than Kilmer, and there is something compelling about his manic performance. At times his neurosis works - his Remington feels like a veteran who has been through numerous scrapes.

Other times, he plays into Goldman’s misgivings - whenever Remington has to play the tough-minded mentor, Douglas comes off as a posturing fool. Hence his death lacks the gut punch that was intended.

 

I still think the bigger flaw is the conception of Patterson - if Patterson was more unready and traumatized (and if Kilmer played those qualities with more intensity), then the movie would have more of a sense of progression when Remington is killed and he has to step up. 

I would like to read Goldman’s script because I think the movie was fumbled in the execution. 

The big problem is that The Ghost and the Darkness lacks a sense of escalation - there are moments of tension, and plenty of gorey deaths - but it never feels like the world is falling apart.

Events happen which should feel important but they just pass by - Tom Wilkinson is terrific as Kilmer’s terrifying boss, but as Patterson’s failures mount up, it never feels like he is in danger - either of losing his job or his life.

Part of the problem is the context - Patterson is a British colonist overseeing a massive workforce of Africans and Indians.

While parts of the film feel like they are almost about to make a serious point about imperialism, the movie also wants to be an earnest jungle adventure, racial politics be damned.

It is hard to empathize with Patterson -  he is here to build a bridge. The biggest thing he has at risk is his reputation.

When worker Abdullah (Om Puri) organizes a shutdown over the lion attacks, it feels like the movie has miscalculated in terms of who has the strongest motivation in this situation.

The film benefits from being shot in Africa, and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond makes it look lived-in, but the movie always feels at a remove.

The movie used real lions but their effect only really comes into focus at the climax - they add a certain verisimilitude, but not much else.

 

Director Stephen Hopkins has a spotty career as a genre filmmaker (Elm Street 5, Predator 2 and Lost in Space), and he seems most at home with the suspense sequences. The movie looks slick, but there is no sense of a throughline - the action is covered and that is about it.

I left the movie disappointed.

As a revisionist take on the ‘african adventure’ movie, it is damp squib. As a monster movie it is passable. It always feels like the movie has some higher ambitions but it is never clear what they are. The movie feels like it should have leaned into its pulpy origins and just focused on being a scary movie about man-eating lions.

Ultimately, The Ghost and the Darkness feels like a remake waiting to happen.

BITE-SIZED: Small Soldiers (Joe Dante, 1998)

What happens when you combine action figures with the latest in military software?

Directed by Joe Dante, on the surface Small Soldiers feels like it could be something more subversive and anarchic - a companion piece to Dante’s Gremlins duology, The ‘Burbs et al.

The final film is a weird beast - parts of it feel like a Verhoeven-style satire of the way militarism has infiltrated American society, other parts feel like a kids movie about learning valuable life lessons.

Because of the gulf between these dueling tones, the movie is slightly bland.

It is entertaining, and the all-star cast of toys (played by Tommy Lee Jones,  the surviving members of the Dirty Dozen and Spinal Tap) steal the show.

But the parody of war and military cliches is mostly toothless and the protagonist’s arc does not pack emotional punch.

Gregory Smith feels miscast as Alan Abernathy - I do not blame the actor but the character feels undefined. We are told he has been ejected from two schools for vague reasons, and his dad does not trust him - except he also helps run his dad’s store and only shows his own initiative.

At the end of the movie, his dad finally trusts him, but it gets a little lost.

Part of Small Soldier’s blunted effect may also be computer generated. This was Dante’s first work with the technology, and so it loses some of the visceral tactility of Gremlins.

The effects have aged but they are helped by the fact that the characters they are used to create are made of plastic, plus this is early enough in the technology that there is a focus on integrating them with puppetry.

A few scenes suffer from the sheer number of animated characters on screen. When there are a few toys, it iworks but during the third act when there are dozens of toys bounding around it starts to feel like the battle scene at the end of The Phantom Menace.

The movie ends on an appropriately cynical note - the company covers up the incident and is looking forward to selling the toys to the military - but this attempt at satire gets muffled by the sincerity of Alan’s storyline.

     

Maybe Dante cannot reach that kind of sincerity, or the demands of a big budget meant the movie lost its bite. Whatever the reason, this movie feels like a pulled punch.

Small Soldiers is still fun. But the shadow of something more anarchic and funny is always present.

Billion Dollar Brain (Ken Russell, 1967)

Press-ganged back into service, Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is sent to FInland where he follows a trail of clues that lead him into a confrontation with a megalomaniacal billionaire preparing to wage a private war against the USSR. 

An allegory for the follies of American individualism. A parody of Bond villain plots. A pisstake on Texas.

This one takes a while to get going but when it does, Billion Dollar Brain goes into outer space.

As a thriller it is a failure, except as a time bomb.

From the beginning we are in different territory - Palmer has left the service and is working as a (failing) private detective.

We are introduced to his cramped, dirty office-cum-apartment as someone is burglarising it.

Of course it ends up being an entree for Palmer to get back into espionage.

 

This cues the Palmer series’ final hat trick of Bond alumni as we get an energetic title sequence from Maurice Binder (and Ken Adam is replaced by fellow Bond production designer Syd Cain).

If the first two Palmer movies were a reaction to the excess of James Bond, Brain is a Bond movie refracted.

The movie breaks down into three sections.

• A somewhat confounding mission to Finland 

• A hyperkinetic detour to Texas

• A surreal remake of the ice battle from Alexander Nevsky 

Of all the Palmer movies, this one is the most misshapen. Caine is on record saying director Ken Russell was out of his element with the genre, and it feels like it.

The movie  is at its most alive in the bric-a-brac of the locations - Palmer’s dingey apartment/office, the flurried excitement of the anti-communists at lunch. 

These moments are lost in the morass as the movie plods through the various trails of Palmer’s mission.

And then the movie heads to​​ Texas, and Midwinter’s compound, and the movie gains a centre.

Midwinter’s rally, filled with anti-communism, the Bible and pure megalomania, feels sadly evergreen. 

The editing becomes expressionistic, cutting rapidly between Begley’s sweaty screaming face, Communist posters and other paraphernalia burning in fires, and Midwinter’s supporters marching around.

At no point does it feel like Midwinter’s plan will succeed. The tension comes from whether our heroes will be stuck when it all goes to hell.

If Harry Palmer felt like a minor player in Funeral, he is basically a bystander in Billion Dollar Brain. He accomplishes little other than to bear witness to the follies of the film’s doomed antagonists.

Caine appears to be on autopilot, but his role is so peripheral it almost feels like a choice.

  

Thankfully, the rest of the cast take up the space he gives up.

Ed Begley is hilarious as the deranged billionaire Midwinter, and Oscar Homolka makes a welcome return as Colonel Stock.

Billion Dollar Brain is a strange conclusion to the trilogy - it would be like if the first two Jason Bourne movies were followed by Octopussy. Some purists might blanche at its eccentricity, but that singularity ends up being its strength.