2013 delivered two different action movies centered on recognizable movie stars saving the President of the United States during an attack on the White House. One of these was Olympus Has Fallen, the first of these two films to hit theaters and the one that turned into a sizable box office hit. Olympus proved lucrative enough to spawn two further sequels. The other White House action movie that year was White House Down, a box office non-starter that got drowned in the deluge of blockbusters that graced the summer of 2013. That’s a downright tragedy because White House Down isn’t just the superior movie of the two. It’s also the most underrated title in director Roland Emmerich’s catalog.
In hindsight, White House Down is an anomaly in the action blockbuster track record of Emmerich. Typically, this filmmaker embarks on global apocalypse movies like Independence Day, 2012, or the new motion picture Moonfall. If you hand Emmerich a sizable budget, he’s going to blow up every nook and cranny on Earth. Meanwhile, White House Down is a Die Hard pastiche that largely confines its action to its titular location rather than taking the action across multiple continents. The imagery on-screen is channeling classic 1980s action schlockfest, not natural disasters.
Though a departure from those blockbuster standards, this is a boon for White House Down, as it informs several advantages to the feature that other Emmerich projects, like The Day After Tomorrow, simply couldn’t do. For one thing, the comparatively smaller-scale scope of the story allows for the emphasis of the production to be on the comedic rapport between leading men Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx. Without a barrage of VFX-laden scenes of big cities going boom to lean on, White House Down has to find its pleasures in the simpler, and more satisfying, things.
In another welcome departure from its director’s blockbuster norms, White House Down isn’t a pervasively downbeat exercise. Despite being known for his crowd-pleaser fare, Emmerich’s works often get plagued by tonal issues that torpedo potentially fun concepts. Something like 10,000 B.C. was dragged down from being enjoyable popcorn fare by a morose tone that felt ill-suited to a movie where people in loincloths dart around the thundering footsteps of mammoths. The same could be said for The Day After Tomorrow, which mistook solemn melodrama for captivating drama you could get invested in.
White House Down, by contrast, is full of jokes and light-hearted wit. Though it doesn’t lapse into parody, it isn’t afraid to deliver the kind of jokes and earnest silliness you want out of an action movie like this. Just look at one of the movie’s most memorable moments concerning a previously dweeby White House tour guide. This figure concludes his character arc in the third act by cocking a shotgun and bellowing, “Alright folks! Tour’s over!” Meanwhile, the day, and America itself, eventually gets saved by Joey King using her flag-twirling skills on the White House lawn, a development played without a single wink to the camera.
Maybe these moments will make you roll your eyes, maybe it’ll make you cheer at the uninhibited corniness occurring before your pupils. Whatever your response, you can never say that White House Down is a tonal slog to sit through.
Much of the light-hearted fun comes from the surprisingly delightful chemistry between Tatum and Foxx. Modern Hollywood has a bad habit of making subpar movies like Passengers that just assume two people that are both famous will automatically sizzle together. Thankfully, that’s not the case with White House Down. Tatum and Foxx prove to be a delightful combo, particularly in their comedic back-and-forth that punctuates the personality details in their respective characters. The latter performer is especially great as a classy President who can jab people in the neck with pens if the occasion calls for it. With performances this endearing, it’s hard not to get swept up in the infectiously fun atmosphere Tatum and Foxx concoct.
Plus, the duo’s rapport is yet another way White House Down becomes a stand-out in the world of Emmerich’s filmography. Save for Independence Day, how many of this man’s movies have you walking out of the theater complimenting the performances of the actors? Often, this man’s productions just have flesh and blood people reacting to CG carnage happening just off-screen. In White House Down, those same people are the stars of the production, and putting them center-stage allows an entertaining dynamic between Tatum and Foxx to blossom.
Speaking of the advantages of dealing with human beings, White House Down proves an enjoyable deviation from Emmerich’s standards in how it defines antagonism. Usually, a feature from this auteur creates the concept of looming threats through CG tidal waves coming over mountains or New York City getting covered in snow. These elements can create pretty-looking imagery, but they don’t deliver a Hans Gruber or Loki, a distinctly human villain you can love to hate. Human-based foes in these larger disaster movies are usually just weaselly government officials who could’ve wandered in from any other movie.
White House Down, meanwhile, provides a barrage of welcome distinctly human adversaries in the form of a gaggle of white supremacists, hackers, and other ne’er-do-wells, led by James Woods and Jason Clarke, the latter playing a diabetic mercenary. This collection of foes chews up the scenery and provides lots of entertainingly repulsive people for our heroes to face off against. Woods especially excels at playing a spurred Secret Service agent. His dialogue deliveries are just drenched in entitled anger and Emmerich smartly keeps the camera focused on just this performance rather than letting this principal antagonist get overwhelmed by a deluge of CGI chaos.
Above all else, there’s a sense of affection between the characters that makes White House Down such a pleasant surprise. Some of Emmerich’s other works, namely 2012, get so caught up in delivering bigger and bigger sequences of disastrous mayhem that the humans get lost in all the apocalyptic devastation. Everyday people only exist to get crushed by buildings, there’s no acknowledgment of the human cost of all this mayhem. This can make the bloated runtimes of such movies a chore. Why should audiences get invested in the melodrama of these people if the film they inhabit is zoning out?
The smaller-scale nature of White House Down, not to mention the fact that the plot is spurred by a hostage situation, means that this film has to be conscious of the human cost of its action scenes. This doesn’t intrude on the zippy tone of the feature as a whole, but it does mean there’s less of a detachment between the humans in the frame and the action scenes happening around them. Though this element and other critical aspects of White House Down are largely a deviation from what’s become known as Roland Emmerich’s standard filmmaking, that’s also why this project is both the most underrated and one of the strongest titles in this man’s filmography. Can the considerably more forgettable Olympus Has Fallen claim that?
