This is not White House Down. I haven't seen that one yet, and I hope that it's better.
The idea of taking the White House for one of these movies is a pretty good one. I mean, you can have some exciting stuff happen, and similar things happened for Air Force One and Salt. Those were both pretty decent movies, and I wouldn't even mind watching either of them again. This movie, however, departs pretty radically.
Think of this as a Salt meets Die Hard, but all of the buildup to realism of Salt and humor of Die Hard is lost. So, we find ourselves with an impressively unrealistically executed attack on the White House. I mean, everything about it was just never going to happen. From the embedding of bad guys in the South Korean diplomatic core to a group of 20 guys with sub-machine guns somehow taking out all of the Secret Service forces around the White House, this goes beyond staining credulity into just completely not believable.
I have met and talked to some Secret Service guys in my time, and they all came off as competent above all else. To write them as the bumbling idiots that are in this movie does a disservice to them and to the American people. I mean seriously - if someone is shredding people running out the front door, no trained agent is going to then run through that same door like Disney's version of a lemming.
Gerard Butler plays the supersoldier who has been relegated to a desk job and winds up being the only one capable of killing every bad guy and saving every good guy. He manages to get a direct line to the interim president and starts issuing orders that everyone simply obeys. I know I have to suspend my disbelief when I watch a film, but there was so much going on that was simply outside the possibility of anything on this whole damn planet that I just couldn't.
Cinematography was excellent.
Special effects were very good.
Acting was okay.
Plot was bad.
Dialogue was canned.
Even Morgan Freeman had nothing good going on.
1.25/5