Roland Emmerich has built a fairly impressive career based mostly on blowing things up. He’s the guy who did movies like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, so he definitely knows his way around an explosion. His latest film, White House Down, stars Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx, and it’s basically Emmerich’s meditation on destroying the White House. Over the course of the movie the iconic residence’s walls get riddled with bullet holes, its priceless relics get smashed by terrorists, its roof gets destroyed by crashing helicopters, and huge portions of it get blown to smithereens. It’s a solid concept for a movie that’s ready-made to be a crowd pleaser, barring any extreme incompetence from the filmmakers, so I guess the big question here is whether or not any extreme incompetence gets put on display. Turns out, this blank-faced sheep dog of a movie is actually pretty well put together.
Action movies that exist on the scale that White House Down does only need to do a few simple things in order to be entertaining. They have to have a script that isn’t so poorly written you focus on how poorly written it is, they have to feature actors who aren’t so wooden when working with special effects that you’re distracted by how unnatural they are, and they have to feature action scenes that are edited together clearly enough that you don’t get frustrated because you can’t tell what’s supposed to be happening. Though what they’ve made here is vapid and disposable and completely without any insight or artistic merit, Emmerich and his people manage to accomplish all three of those simple things, so their movie ends up being quite a bit of fun to watch.
First off, let’s address the script that’s credited to writer James Vanderbilt. The basic premise is that terrorists have taken over the White House, leaving the President (Jamie Foxx) without any protection other than a wannabe Secret Service agent (Channing Tatum), and the fate of the entire free world depending on their surviving the situation. The story being told isn’t anything provocative or revolutionary, but it’s a capable enough glue to hold the film’s action sequences together and give them context. The characters here are largely archetypes, but we’re given their motivations early enough and their dialogue is natural enough that you care about them anyway. Too often in films aimed at a broad audience like this the characters are painted as cyphers, so as not to alienate any potential audience members, and they end up feeling so generic that you might as well be watching an action figure or a video game avatar up on the screen—and that’s no fun at all.
The acting is where this movie really shines. Tatum has proven that he usually works well as a wise-cracking hero, in the vein of a John McClane, so thankfully that’s the sort of role he gets cast in here. It seems like agents and directors have finally figured out how to use this guy best, and at this point his early-career reputation of being a wooden dullard has been erased. Just have him be himself and don’t make him take things too seriously, and he’s golden. Foxx is reliably charismatic and able to deliver drama, so he’s unsurprisingly able to make his President character someone who you can both root for and who you can semi-believe would hang himself out of the side of a fast-moving car and rocket launch something. It does get a little strange how much of a doppelgänger his character is of President Obama, and how much the film relies on the affection we have for him as the current President to carry over to their fictional character, but things are generally kept light enough that the situation doesn’t get too exploitive. All in all, Tatum and Foxx make a good team of protagonists.
One of the easiest ways to make mindless action movies like this fun is to fill them with super sleazy bad guys, and in that respect White House Down has done great, because from Jason Clarke’s cocky leader, to Jimmi Simpson’s pretentious hacker, to Kevin Rankin’s gross, white supremacist thug, this movie is full of villains whose faces you want to punch. Just put that in perspective for a minute—this is a big budget action movie that features one of the McPoyles from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and the greasy RA from Undeclared as bad guys. Awesome. Throw in perennial acting rocks like James Woods and Richard Jenkins in important supporting roles, a strong turn from newcomer Joey King as Tatum’s daughter, and you’ve got yourself a hell of a cast bringing this ludicrous story to life.
Putting questions of acting and writing aside though, the action is always the featured element of the big dumb action movie, so if a movie like White House Down fails to deliver fun action sequences, all of the serviceable writing and strong acting in the world isn’t going to do much to save it. The good news here is that all of the action sequences we’re presented with are entertaining in a base way. There’s nothing inventive or amazing in their staging, and they’re not on a scale that’s going to drop your jaw or anything, but they avoid the two major pitfalls that have been sinking pretty much every action movie Hollywood has produced lately, which are taking things to so broad and unbelievable a place that the action becomes meaningless cartoon violence, and filming everything so close and with so many edits that the audience can’t follow what’s going on.
Emmerich will likely never have the reputation of being a master craftsman when it comes to filmmaking, but he has at least proven at this point that he can capably construct and shoot action sequences, and that he always at least tries to properly develop his characters. And with this film he shows that he can handle tone as well, as he’s able to perfectly ride that fine line between making something that is spectacle but not farce. Perhaps the most important thing he does here though is keep the emphasis of his film squarely focused on the stakes and the outcomes of the action scenarios. In order to truly find an action scene thrilling, you have to care about its outcome, and you have to care about the safety of the characters involved. White House Down uses its first act to establish its characters and make clear what’s at stake for them at a personal level, and it then elevates things in the second act by blowing the personal conflicts up into having world-threatening consequences, but it still wisely keeps the focus on the interpersonal confrontations that are easier to buy into and easier to care about than all of that world-ending nonsense. Then it gives us a finale that doesn’t go as far as to make rubble of an entire city and kill faceless millions, but that instead wrecks one building pretty thoroughly and gives us the grisly ends of a handful of characters who we’ve been introduced to and feel like we’ve gotten to know. Action movies may not be high art, but when you stick to the basics like Emmerich does here, they can be a lot of fun to watch.
