Emmerich gleefully inflicts suffering on a doughy Fox News-ish reporter, while a particularly lunkheaded dialogue exchange informs us that the dark power behind this threat to America is “the industrial-military complex”.
Both characters are hip and smart, though only Foxx gets to rock a pair of Air Jordans (Barack’s sneakers of choice).ĭecidedly unhip are the villains, all of whom happen to have right-wing leanings.
Once the leads team up in a bid to sneak away to safety, the movie properly shifts into gear it avoids the obvious bickering-but-gradually-learning-to-accept-each-other route in favour of instant warmth and funny repartee. Where Harrison Ford’s gruff Prez in Air Force One wasn’t tied to either party, Foxx’s Nicorette-chewing President Sawyer is blatantly modelled on Obama, albeit with less emphasis on federal emergency management and more on kicking the booty of treacherous voters.
And with Tatum and Jamie Foxx as Secret Service wannabe/leader of the free world, he’s got the sparkiest double-act of the summer (sorry, Tonto). At another, a reporter exclaims, “Oh my God, it’s President Sawyer and he’s got a rocket launcher!” There are several moments where it’s a mere string or two away from Team America: World Police, not least a recurring beat where various politicos are sworn in as Commander-In-Chief, each time harder to watch with a straight face than the last.īut for the most part, Emmerich is in on the joke. At one point, Channing Tatum threatens a squirrel with a handgun. life as That’s My Bush!, it’s also the most fun the director has been since ID itself. Big, goofy, loud and as realistic a view of D.C. Avenue pandemonium: the all-the-money-in-the-Treasury shot in Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, that sees the building get lasered by a UFO? Clearly not Emmerich, who freezes the exposition in the early stretch of White House Down just long enough to have a tour guide namecheck his own film.
But who can forget the high-water mark of Penn. How can the same shit happen to the same executive residence twice? Or, in fact, thrice? The White House obviously had a bad time in this year’s Olympus Has Fallen, a movie so patriotic it had Gerard Butler brain a baddie in the Oval Office using a bust of Abraham Lincoln.