Film Review - White House Down (2013)

White House Down stars Channing Tatum as Cale, a police officer who dreams of a job with the US Secret Service protecting the President (Jamie Foxx) who makes a vow to withdraw all US troops from the Middle East but during a tour of the White House with his young daughter, the place is attacked Die Hard style.

White House Down was for me, a very fun time at the movies, mainly due to some smart writing by James Vanderbilt and solid direction by Roland Emmerich who also made the Day After Tomorrow and 2012, Tomorrow I really enjoyed whilst 2012 was simply too silly for my liking though this film is a nice return to form for him.

And Vanderbilt's script is a big reason for that, it's a script that has it's quiet moments solidly written that made me think that this had been thought through to some extent whilst it's action scenes for the most part are completely silly and it's not afraid to embrace that fact which for me added to the enjoyment of the film and at times I was reminded a great deal of the first Die Hard film, especially during one scene with a Tank.

The film also has some very solid villains, for me a big big big requirement for the overall success of an action picture and this movie more than delivers on that front, notably James Woods and Jason Clarke who is excellent in this movie essentially playing the Alexander Godunov role from Die Hard (I don't want neutral, I want dead) and Woods well when I saw his name pop up I thought "This won't be good, he was the lord of the Underworld" a reference to his voice role as Hades in Disney's Hercules.

As for Tatum and Foxx well they make a pretty good duo but I would've preferred Chris Evans in Tatum's role as he embodies the all American Action Hero better than Tatum does plus Evans has more charisma and screen presence than Tatum does who is very bland here in this role though Foxx more than picks up the pace in that department and does very well as the President as does Michael Murphy, Richard Jenkins and Maggie Gyllenhall in their roles as well as Joey King who plays the daughter.

As for the film's action scenes well some of them are quite good while the film's hand to hand fight scenes are not, they're shot too close and edited too quickly so you lose track of who's who and where they are during some of them.

But sadly the action critically lacks the teeth of the post Die Hard action films it wants to be like as there is a fairly big body count piled up during this film and almost little to no blood is shown which I found hard to believe nor does it have the coarse language those films had much more of, there's some of it here but not as much as I would've liked given the kind of film it wants to be.

But this point sadly is not the film's fault but rather the US rating guidelines it has to work in, almost every big action picture has to have the PG-13 rating attached to it (the American version of our M rating) in order to bring in the biggest possible audience so that the film could bring in big box office numbers on it's opening weekend whereas if this film had indeed been made in the post Die Hard era where R rated action films were allowed to be made (some of which were rated M here in Australia, Die Hard being one of them) then this would've had the violence and language it needs to become a real winner as without those elements, the film gets a bit hollow at times and given how so much of this film works, its a real shame.

So all in all despite Tatum's blandness and some fairly hollow action in parts, White House Down is great fun due to smart writing and solid villains, well worth a look, 3 and a half out of 5.