Reviews

I'm not a huge fan of brainless action flicks usually.

Yet while White House Down didn't have the most sophisticated plot lines, action sequence or CGI, I still find it much more acceptable than Olympus Has Fallen. It's like they're twins, with opposite personalities.

One thing I clearly liked better in this movie was the characterization.

They are humane, more realistic and relatable to most people. Their interactions and dialogs are fluid and fun to watch (even though they're improbable in real life). You can find yourself rooting for them in the movie.

Even the villains are more...three-dimensional. Walker had clear objective and well-explained personal motives that are actually quite understandable (but not quite agreeable). Kang's motivation was valid enough, but stoic, one-dimensional deliverance rendered it unbelievable.

The other thing I liked about White House Down was that they included competent female and child characters instead of just using them as "maiden-in distress" kind of props. Waving a flag is much more useful than curling up in a ball crying your eyes out.

While the terrorist vs. lone hero plot is definitely a cliché - it was surprising to see domestic hate-group terrorists in the movie. Usually, Hollywood depictions of terrorists are foreigners who speak in heavily accented English or no English at all.

As with any other action movies, in which the heroes seems to deter bullets magically, the movie requires turning off half your brain in order to enjoy the ride. But the questionable details (aside from the whole white house security breach by janitors part) aren't so obvious. Not many people would actually know details about the Presidential Limo, the Air Force One or the U.S's homeland security protocols. The problem solving in the movie is so simple that it is quite justifiable to solve them by throwing off grenades and launching missiles.

Unfortunately, the thing that cripples the movie the most is the action itself: the half hearted one-on-one fights that never show off the gritty, skillful fights people seem to expect from today's action movies; The machine guns used mostly to shred furnishings apart instead of doing serious numbers on body counts; The scarcity of blood and gore; The lack of fancy high explosive weapons and thus the absence of highly destructive explosive scenes. The list may cause a major let down for most hard core action flick fan. Then again this is a PG-13 movie...

But I'm not saying an action movie with all the violent stuff mentioned above would necessarily be a good movie. Story always comes first.