Day two of my rehab mission, better health through cinematic sickness... and I got brave. Real brave. I looked through the stack of unwatchables and selected me a prime cut of beefcake. Channing Tatum in.. White House Down. With Jamie Foxx as president and James Woods as the High Blood Pressured Vitriolic .. well, he kind of plays himself in every movie he is in. James Woods as, the James Woods guy.
I suited up, threw on my Great White Sneaks and fired up the stationary bike's diesel motors, Kidding! That wouldn't make any sense. Obviously the whole point is to power the bike myself! With my muscles and, as I would find out, the rage that courses through me from a truly bad movie.
I was in for 131 minutes of pure fist pumping man-among-men chest beating slimjim snapping-into testosterone fueled.. detonation. Just think back to when you were watching ID4 and there is that cool part where the White House blows up. Somewhere, in some strip bar, a sweaty twitching head looks up from the line after line of cocaine that was being snorted, sees that scene on the bar TV and with a voice that sounds a lot like, but wasn't, Jesse the Body Ventura, yells "HELL YEA! THAT'S A WHOLE MOVIE, SON! RIGHT FUGGIN THERE!" This guy had tried to make Top Gun 2 and failed and here was his dream ticket!
White House Down.
Said Dramatically.
Let's go through this by the numbers. The setup. Beefy cheescake/neckless mandroid Channing Tatertots is a divorced dad/ex military dude who is now.. a security guy I guess.. who is trying to get a job as a secret service agent to give him some walking around money for when he isn't on the catwalk with runway models Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller. Important note.. he argues with squirrels. I imagine the sequel will go more into this plot point as it's touched on here but not explored. Anyways! So, he sweet talks a blander looking hottie who works at the White House into getting him an interview for the job with an old girlfriend who happens to be head of secret service, I think. OK I have to call foul right here. One of my ex girlfriends, who is head of NSA, or, let's be fair even my other ex girlfriend who is Ambassador to Chile, wouldn't be able to get me in for an interview for any high level government jobs so I call bullshit on this, just based on personal experience. Go ahead, ask a former lover of yours who is conveniently high up in the US govt working pretty much next to the President of the United States, they will back me on this. I will wait. See? I am right. This took me right out of the movie. The rest of the movie is like a documentary to me but this part here.. I just didn't buy it. On the other hand, Jeff Goldblum cough cough ID4 cough cough cable repair guy cough cough knows president. OK FINE! Fine. I guess it's possible.
Um, I forget a lot of stuff at this point, I had turned on the subtitles but the words I was seeing were such .. endless prattle that just reeked of pointless set up and botched character development attempts that I was instead looking at the picture on the wall and thinking I was actually out riding a bike in springtime.. can you smell the scent of of the fresh flowers or is it just me.. wheee...
Sorry! I returned to my corporal body the moment some shit blew up. Let's rejoin the movie there. Guys dressed as repairmen sneak into the white house and blow some shit up.. BOOM goes the dynamite.Or thermals or whatever Hollywood now calls the stuff makes stuff go BOOM.
I gotta stop right there. Based on the 45 Die Hards and Lethal Weapons and , Ocean's Thirteens and.. what else? Anyways.. if I am White House security, anyone who approaches me in repairman garb.. I am just going to gun them down. Double tap 'em too. And I think the White House would have my back on this. "yea, he had on a repair guy uniform, so I shot him. You're welcome. A commendation and a raise? Thank you sir!"
How many times is this repairman trick going to work? Are they going to wheel up a trojan Comcast Truck to Fort Knox in the next Die Hard? "Yea, you as Syfy signal be snowy, we's, how to say (because all bad guys are European), for us to fix with bullet."
Back to the movie. Someone does indeed do something sneaky, admittedly it's fuzzy, and as they say "the shit it starts blowing up good."
Me, I am exploding too, with rage at the idiocy of this film. "You Idiots!" "Come on! No way!" etc etc.
There is no truth to the rumor that I paused this movie to go off and kill myself so that I did not have to watch any more. But I did have to step away Mid-Explosion (so, somewhere between 0:20:00 and 2:20:00) to go outside and live. But when I got back, I just plugged back in and shit resumed exploding.
So what did this movie give us that no other movie (and by that I mean, every other action movie) has given us before? Hero with stain on record, supposedly nonredeemable, trying to change, no one will let him. Former lovers dumping on the guy who every woman in audience would drop panties for in a red hot minute. Scenery chewing bad guy who you initially thought was a good guy. Oh the hero of course has a young kid who initially doesn't respect him but when he saves planet earth she loves him again. Hero is divorced. Ladies! You can openly drool for him AND fawn over his precocious young girl. It's all good! And a random side character who is wimpy but says the most clever hilarious things and isn't scared when he should be! Ah comic relief, the salsa on the side of the scrambled eggs of my discontent.
However I have a lot of respect for Channing Tatum. When Michael Keaton was in the Batman costume for the first Batman movie and couldn't turn his neck, it limited his performance as Batman, made him appear stilted. But Channing, who has no neck, was able to seamlessly appear like a block of wood (not to be confused with a seamless block of James Woods) that was thrown through the air by explosions/bullets/bullet explosions/exploding bullets/exploding explosions with no problems. He made it look so natural! A lot of actors would break character during many of the scenes of this movie, and act, but Channing held onto his craft with both beefy arms and managed to avoid acting for the entire duration of this movie.Side Note: it was a trick of the camera probably but I swear to God it seemed like he turned his head once.. I know! Brilliant. Only he could have sold it with that body of his. It's all in the nuances. Sometimes less is more. So, sometimes nothing whatsoever is everything? If so, Tatum = Everything. Everything = Tatum.
Also, God Bless the NRA for supplying what amounts to the entire arsenal of a medium sized third world country for this movie. I don't mind seeing stuff blow up and, well, everything else might have sucked but I did see just about everything I could think of blow up real good. Mostly just bullet-riddled actually. Except for Tatum and Fox. Who managed to avoid all but one bullet and, of course, that bullet was deflected by a pocket watch. Because as we all know, everyone has a pocket-watch in their breast pocket. Duh!
A special shout out to James Woods. I admit I am a huge James Woods fan and if, when he got pissed, he would have started to just punch his way through solid walls while screaming in rage, I would have been on board. In retrospect I am bummed I didn't see that. A maniacal James Woods punching through steel reinforced White House Walls like a terminator robot.. now that's good moviemakin! Hollywood, listen up. I would order up that movie ticket right now.
OK just to remind myself, I went to IMDB and, there are movie quotes. So, there was dialogue in this movie. For a moment I wasn't sure. A shout out to IMDB for being my resource!
Here is a stellar quote from this opus:
So, recap. Lots of things blew up and I got over two hours of cardio in.
I give this movie * out of 10. Because you can find a ton of different movies with exploding stuff and think "yep, better than White House Down."
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