Wait a minute, didn’t we just see this movie a couple of weeks ago? I can’t smoke pot at home anymore because… oh, I dunno. Something Obama did? He’s cool to blame for this stuff, right? So I do it at the movies. This week: Tatums get Channinged all over in White House Down.
If there’s one thing Hollywood is good at spending millions of dollars doing, it’s copying themselves. Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen treated us to the spectacle of a terrorist takeover of the White House earlier in the summer, and now we’re getting Roland Emmerich’s take on it. The two movies are basically the same – like some dumbass NYC conceptual artist could do an “installation” where he projected them on top of each other and Tumblr bloggers would go nuts over it.
C-Tatez plays a prospective Secret Service agent who is going in for an interview to impress his daughter. He doesn’t get the job, but when Geopolitical Bad Guys attack the place, he saves the President and then the pair have to save a little girl. I haven’t seen an action plot this dumb since Commando, and that’s kind of what this flick reminded me of – just pure cornball 80s all the way, big explosions and bigger plot holes.
But you know what? It doesn’t really matter. Jamie Foxx is the President, for God’s sake, and at one point he fires a rocket launcher out the window of the Presidential limousine. This is basically like DLC for the new Saint’s Row game made into a movie, and it’s pretty good. I’d say it’s better than Olympus Has Fallen simply because it doesn’t take itself as seriously. It’s OK for a movie to be dumb if it’s smart about being dumb. I think that’s kind of Channing Tatum’s whole career in a nutshell.
Disclaimer: I fixed all the typos and grammar errors but left all the other dumb stuff in.