10:16 a.m. - 2014-03-23
WHITE HOUSE DOWN (2013)
This movie is either a remake of "Die Hard" with Channing Tatum playing Bruce Willis or "Air Force One" with Jamie Foxx playing Harrison Ford. Like John Carpenter's "Halloween," the first "Die Hard" was so good and so original that it led to not just a lot of inferior sequels, not just a bunch of copycat films, but a whole genre of copycat Die Hards. And nothing dies harder than Die Hard ripoffs.

As the title suggests, "White House Down" poses not only a terrorist threat, but a terrorist threat inside the President's mansion. And as if having POTUS in danger wasn't enough, the writers had to throw in a brave little girl who just happens to be the daughter of the only guy in the entire District of Columbia who has the smarts and cajones to stand up to the terrorists. Because the armed forces of the US apparently don't have the wherewithal or (according to some bogus posse commitatus legal babble argument) even the authority to rescue the leader of the Western world.

Frustrating to watch first a tank and later a squad of Blackhawk helicopters take it on the chin from the well-armed and better-organized villains, but even harder given the total lack of believability. When the little girl posts a video of the criminals to YouTube (yes, she does!), the security personnel on the outside immediately use facial recognition software to identify every one of them. Yet these guys managed to enter the WH pretending to be people working on the President's movie theater. No background checks? And (plot spoiler) even given that the head of the Secret Service is in on the plot, wouldn't somebody in the service question admitting this squad of unknowns so close to the First Family?

And I can't help noting the strange plot contrivance that managed to get the black President in basketball shoes for the second half of the movie. Really? Shucks, boss!

Violent, derivative, illogical and even insulting to the viewer, "White House Down" couldn't get much lower.

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