This makes her a useful vessel for exposition about the building’s unique features. She’s also an accomplished flag-twirler and walking encyclopedia of White House trivia. John’s daughter Emily (Joey King) isn’t just a technology-addicted tween chronicling her life for posterity on her own YouTube channel. Channing Tatum co-stars as John Cale, an idealistic police officer and single father who must atone for committing the worst conceivable crime a dad can commit in movies like these: missing his 11-year-old’s talent show. Some of the film’s most inspired moments explicitly riff on Obama’s foibles, like his struggles to kick smoking and his fondness for Air Jordans.įor the buddy-movie shenanigans at the film’s core, Sawyer has a curious dual identity as a brilliant peacemaker and the bookish sidekick to a strapping slab of beefcake. Foxx, a brilliant mimic and a gifted actor, doesn’t directly impersonate Obama so much as he wryly, thoroughly channels the man’s essence, as well as his syntax, body language, and vocal tics. President Sawyer is a brilliant, fearless pacifist when it comes to foreign policy-this fantasy-Obama merits a whole shelf of Nobel Peace Prizes, not just one-yet he isn’t afraid to take up arms personally if terrorists threaten our nation’s future. Where Bill Pullman played an idealized version of Bill Clinton in Independence Day, Jamie Foxx’s President James Sawyer is what President Obama would be if he dramatically exceeded his partisans’ impossible expectations. White House Down and Independence Day also share an absurdly romanticized portrait of America’s president as a dashing action-hero-in-chief. The film’s appealing shamelessness begins with Emmerich, the pop master of mindless spectacle, returning to his greatest triumph by spinning an entire film out of the image of the White House blowing up in Independence Day-a shot actually referenced in James Vanderbilt’s White House Down screenplay as part of White House lore. It’s pure patriotic kitsch, the cinematic equivalent of a black-velvet painting of a bald eagle clutching an American flag in its talons as it soars majestically over Mount Rushmore. They could also borrow huge swaths of the movie’s dialogue and sequences, since White House Down is never more than a sliver away from gleeful self-parody. If Trey Parker and Matt Stone were interested in making a sequel to their brilliant spoof Team America: World Police, they could easily borrow the plot of Roland Emmerich’s preposterous new action extravaganza White House Down.
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