Olympus Has Fallen & White House Down

One of the things I admire about the old Jodie Foster movie The Panic Room is that there are no stupid people in it: every character acts intelligently toward their particular goal in the movie. Alas, in last spring’s Olympus Has Fallen this is not the case. The only character who acts intelligently in context is the ten-year-old son of the President, who, when terrorists attack the White House, hides in one of the secret passages in the building. Let's run it by the numbers: North Korean agents manage to completely staff the South Korean president's security detail, so that when North Korean terrorists strike Washington, the North Korean agents are invited into the White House bunker with the US and South Korean presidents. The president being out of commission and the plot having hand-waved the vice president, the speaker of the house is in charge. First reasonable reaction? Nuke Pyongyang in response to this act of war, perhaps? No, considering the terrorists' demands to remove American troops and the Seventh Fleet from Korea. Then, when the terrorists achieve their goal and get the self-destruct codes for all the US ICBMs and set the destruct sequence countdown starting while the missiles are still in their silos, does anyone think to launch the missiles so they blow up over the polar ice cap? No, they run around trying to find the self-destruct sequence abort code. I wanted to see this for an evening of mindless entertainment. I could have used more entertainment and less jingoistic mindlessness.

Fortunately, later last summer we got the second "terrorists take over the White House" movie: White House Down, which I can happily report is nowhere near as stupid, has a sense of humor and a plot that holds together. The bad guys represent the military-industrial complex who want to keep the President from doing something that might actually make peace break out in the middle east. We've got Jamie Foxx as the President, Channing Tatum as the cop who happens to be in the White House interviewing for a job with his daughter in tow, and Maggie (Ahh) Gyllenhaal as a Secret Service agent. Mindless entertainment, perhaps, but not completely mindless.