5 Reasons to Hail White House Down

Short & Sweet

This has not been a good summer for blockbusters but unlike endless nonsense like The Lone Ranger, noisy mayhem like Pacific Rim, or painfully overextended finales like Man of Steel, White House Down doesn’t take forever to tell a reasonably simple story. And even when it throws in a ludicrous but logical twist at the end it sorts everything out in one stupidly simple scene rather than dragging us thru another 20 exhausting minutes of CGI chaos.

Everything Pays Off…

There’s a reason KH T’* and I chose Roland Emmerich when parodying well-made scripts. Everything pays off – nothing is too stupid to be forgotten, the President’s Lincoln fandom saves his life. Everything Roland sets up will pay off later, even down to Channing Tatum missing his daughter’s talent show. She practised for six weeks honing a skill that, like everything else, will come in extremely handy later on; so better make a mental note of it now.

‘Subtle’ Satire

Roland Emmerich gave you a Dick Cheney lookalike climate change sceptic VP in The Day After Tomorrow being humiliated when climate change forced his people into refugee camps in Mexico. Here he has a black academic President with a liking for Lincoln teaching John Cale what the military-industrial complex is and being prevented from withdrawing from the Middle East by those entrenched interests. And that’s before we get to the aggressive right-wing news anchor who won’t stop crying…

Actually a Good Day to Die Hard

So, there’s a villain discovering a connection between the hero and his prominent annoying female hostage. And, also, misguided good guys roaring in on helicopters to kill everyone with a ill-judged rescue attempt, who end up in flames because they won’t listen to our hero or his conduit; and then start machine-gunning our hero on the roof of the building as he tries to help. Hmm… Wait, and he’s wearing a white vest!

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Maggie Gyllenhaal is basically playing Al to Channing Tatum’s John McClane. That makes no sort of sense at all. She’s all wrong for the part in the Die Hard analogical sense in every way imaginable but her answer to that problem is to give it EVERYTHING she’s got. She’s so ferociously committed, especially in scenes revolving around betrayal and possible redemption, that she provides some kind of perverse dignity that makes all the nonsense around her cinematically plausible.

A Good Day to Die Hard

Bruce Willis returns as NYPD’s finest terrorist/master-thief-killing  Detective John McClane, once again in the wrong place at the wrong time; this  time with his son.

McClane is horrified to find his estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney) has been  arrested in Moscow for killing a man in a nightclub. He flies to Russia, heeding  the warning of his daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) not to make a bad  situation worse. He then, of course, proceeds to make it catastrophic. Jack is  actually an undercover CIA operative trying to protect Komarov (Sebastian Koch),  an oligarch become political prisoner. Komarov has incriminating evidence on  ex-business partner Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov), a man sympathetic to terrorism  and on the point of becoming Defence Minister. Jack’s cover comprehensively  blown by dad he retreats to the safe house run by his Agency handler, Collins  (Cole Hauser). But the unstoppable killers Alick (Radivoje Bukvic) and Irina  (Yuliya Snigir) seem to be one step ahead of the McClanes, and Jack mulishly  refuses John’s advice…

Director (and Dundalk native) John  Moore proved with Behind Enemy Lines  that he could deploy every weapon in the stylistic arsenal, but since then he’s  been serving time putting a glossy sheen on mediocre material. This is his shot  at the big time, but you suspect, despite his unwarranted criticisms of Die Hard 4.0, that he’s still putting a glossy  sheen on sub-par material. The spectacular car-chase following John pursuing  Alick tracking Jack and Komarov doesn’t stint on the vehicular destruction and  Alick’s beast of a machine is a joy to watch. Moore also has a lot of fun with  the thudding ballistics of a helicopter gunship tracking the McClanes down the  façade of a hotel. But, this film is half an hour shorter than all previous  instalments, and that missing 30 minutes would’ve usefully housed humour and  character moments.

Skip Woods’ script shares with his Wolverine plot a terribly disguised  early twist that vitiates a later great twist, and despite being written as a Die Hard it really only latterly feels  like one. There is a glaring reference that cleverly transforms into a traumatic  character death, but while there’re nice moments of musical homage by Marco  Beltrami to Michael Kamen’s iconic score and its appropriation of Beethoven,  frequently we’re treated to Zimmer/Howard Bat-rumblings, and Moore’s hand-held  direction lacks the geographic clarity of McTiernan’s template; something which  Len Wiseman wisely amended his style to synch with in Die Hard 4.0. Acting wise MEW’s bookending  cameo is delightful, while Snigir may (and I say this as a Nikita fan) actually be better than Maggie Q’s 4.0 villainess; her nihilistic rage in  the finale is astonishing. Courtney is physically imposing but he lacks the  endearing charm of Bruce Willis past and present.

This lacks the gleefulness that ‘Yippee-Ki-Yay Mother Russia’ teased, but  it’s an entertaining outing that doesn’t disgrace the franchise.

3/5