“White House Down” (directed by disaster king Roland Emmerich) seems like a replay of “Olympus
Has Fallen” (March 22) but carried to even more absurd heights.
This time, the enemy is a right wing faction from the
government itself (starting with the Secret Service), affiliated with the
Beltway-bandit military industrial complex. So this is not another "Red Dawn".
The hero is a college dropout Cale (Channing Tatum), who
brings his precocious daughter Emily (Joey King) for a White House tour (sorry,
this is no longer possible because of sequestration) while he has an
adversarial, comic interview in the White House to join the Secret Service (it
wouldn’t happen that way).
The right
wing is upset because President Sawyer (aka Barack Obama, played by Jamie Foxx)
will pull troops out of the Middle East and let Israel take the consequences of
its West Bank settlements.
Cale will get to play “Apprentice” without Donald Trump
there, and he will get hired. His
daughter will provide the heroics., partly with her YouTube enable video-cam. The film gets downright offensive when the “terrorists”
use Emily as a hostage and make physical threats.
The film also takes the destruction of both the Capitol (as
a diversion) and White House to more absurd heights. Emmerich mentions the sacking by aliens in
his 1996 film “Independence Day”, and compares the goings-on to the War of
1812. Remember, that was about
impressment – a form of conscription.
The official site is here.
Moscow has a White House, which was sacked in 1991.
I saw the film at the AMC Courthouse in Arlington Sunday
night, almost full. The talkative audience was
giggling at the movie.
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