WHITE HOUSE DOWN: make that Shite House Down

Merely suspending your disbelief won't cut it. Even suspending, hanging, drawing and quartering it doesn't help.
WHITE HOUSE DOWN is so shouting at the screen in anger bad that no amount of withdrawal from the real world will allow you to experience anything remotely approximating escapist pleasure. Director Roland Emmerich's sole purpose is to blow up as much as possible of one of America's most iconic landmarks while ensuring there's not a hair out of place on the head of cinema's latest Bruce Willis self-effacing action hero wannabe, Tatum Channing.

He plays Capitol Hill cop John Cale who just happens to be on a tour of the White House with his young, politics-crazy daughter, Emily, when a bunch of terrorists masquerading as home theater technicians seize control of the mansion and take the President (Jamie Foxx) hostage.  Having just moments earlier been rejected for a job with the Secret Service because he's unreliable and doesn't follow orders, Cale now finds himself the President's sole hope of survival and the world's only defense against the outbreak of nuclear war.
As a ridiculously well informed news media covers every nail biting moment from ridiculously close to the scene of the action, the big question is - can Cale rise to the occasion or will he screw it up?
What do you think?
For all Emmerich's efforts to create a sense of uncertainty, the end result is never in doubt and the only real question is how much of the White House will be left standing by the time Cale's through proving to Secret Service Special Agent Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal) that she made a big mistake when she turned him down.
Despite being grotesquely outgunned by terrorists who've managed to smuggle a veritable arsenal of weapons into the most closely guarded government building in the world, Cale clearly has a whole gang of angels watching over him. How else to explain the terrorists complete inability to hit him with a single bullet despite firing hundreds at him and their marksmanship in taking out dozens of highly trained police and secret service agents with a single shot?
WHITE HOUSE DOWN is not the first action thriller to pit a lone individual against a gang of well armed, fanatical crack shots but it is the first one I can think of to represent the US government as both benign and totally incompetent at protecting itself from such a small-sized threat. Every single

security system it has in place to protect the President and the White House and the Capitol Building and Air Force One fails, at the same time as the scores of supposedly highly trained Secret Service agents and police demonstrate their total unpreparedness to respond to a surprise attack - which is presumably what all that training was intended to prepare them for.
Seen in this light WHITE HOUSE DOWN is actually a deeply disturbing critique of the current political-military obsession with security and secrecy, dressed up as a celebration of the enduring belief in the power of the individual to make a difference. We should be out in the streets protesting en masse at the continuing surrender of our rights and personal freedoms in the name of protecting our security! And maybe we would be if enough of us had actually gone to see the film but - sadly (or not) - at the time of writing the film has yet to recoup even half of it's estimated $150 million dollar budget at the box office.
I'm not surprised at the failure to capture the public's imagination. Despite the similarities with, and references to, Emmerich's 1996 box office smash 'Independence Day', WHITE HOUSE DOWN doesn't come close to recapturing that magic and, at times, it veers dangerously close to an unamusing parody of that earlier blockbuster. Tatum makes a bland and unmemorable leading man, while Foxx carries too much baggage as an action star to be plausible as an ultra-liberal, cerebral, never-handled-a-gun chief executive who's more than happy to defer to Cale when it comes to defending himself from the bad guys. The producers could not have made a worse choice had they cast Wesley Snipes in the part (his disagreements with the US government over taxation policy aside)!
Contrived, implausible, cliched, predictable and just plain stupid, WHITE HOUSE DOWN features everything I hate about summer blockbusters. Bring on the fall and a return to something close to more intelligent filmmaking.