![movies like white house down and olympus has fallen movies like white house down and olympus has fallen](https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Gerard-butler-Olympus-has-fallen-Channing-Tatum-White-house-down.jpg)
- #MOVIES LIKE WHITE HOUSE DOWN AND OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN MOVIE#
- #MOVIES LIKE WHITE HOUSE DOWN AND OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN SERIES#
And, god help us, there's Morgan Freeman who, even playing the House speaker turned acting-president, remains the sad-eyed second-string retainer. There's the timed countdown to Armageddon. There's the traitor who spouts garbled and obviously hypocritical Occupied talking points and then meets his bloody comeuppance. There are stupid bureaucrats who won't listen to our hero and waste lives needlessly. Torture-it has to work! It's too fun not to.Īnd so we slog on. The audience reaction in my theater was jubilant people gasped and laughed as Banning stabbed the guy in the throat and then, as the interrogation got bloodier, they broke into spontaneous applause. Our hero stabs one guy in the throat to get the other one to talk, then stabs the remaining fellow in the knee, all the while boasting about how the US has trained him in information-extraction techniques. There's no Zero Dark Thirty shilly-shallying here, no oh-water-boarding-is-just-enhanced-interrogation, or does-torture-work-or-doesn't-it.
#MOVIES LIKE WHITE HOUSE DOWN AND OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN SERIES#
The film is pretty much an unbroken series of low points, but if I had to pick the absolute worst scene, I would have to go with the one where Banning gleefully tortures two captured terrorists. Instead, the Special Forces trained Banning is simply uber-competent (because. Gerard Butler is no Bruce Willis, and his character has none of John McClane's scrappy vulnerability or cleverness.
![movies like white house down and olympus has fallen movies like white house down and olympus has fallen](https://babbletop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/two-movies-olympus-has-fallen-white-house-down.jpg)
#MOVIES LIKE WHITE HOUSE DOWN AND OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN MOVIE#
The movie imagines ourselves as victims of our own aggression, ever innocent and powerless, and ever newly justified in violence.
![movies like white house down and olympus has fallen movies like white house down and olympus has fallen](http://images.fandango.com/MDCsite/images/featured/201306/comparison-olympus-has-fallen-poster.jpg)
The enemy is North Korea, not Afghanistan, but surely the inspiration here is our drone-strike program. The main point is to somehow-anyhow-set up that Die Hard in the White House pitch, so that we can access the vast portion of the American cowboy hindbrain that spasms when we see a lone hardass struggling against the odds. In the real world, North Korea is nearly as incompetent as its leader is insane it can barely fire a rocket, much less orchestrate a massively complicated, multi-stage, higher-than-high-tech (no box cutters here) split-second operation deep in the American homeland. The controlling paranoid fantasy here is, again, that North Korea is somehow our technological and military superior. Studiously avoiding any reference to America's ongoing use of terror bombing, we imagine ourselves as victims of our own aggression, ever innocent and powerless, and ever newly justified in violence. The antagonist is North Korea, not Afghanistan, but surely the inspiration here, at least semiconsciously, is our drone-strike program. Long set pieces focus on airborne attackers with superior technology mowing down U.S. More subtly, it runs the old War of the Worlds dodge, unleashing our imperial excesses upon ourselves. Inevitably and repulsively, the film has us watch the destruction of the Washington Monument in a scene that deliberately evokes the World Trade Center collapse. Again, this is accomplished in the expected manner. Once we have established the transcendental rectitude and sympathy of the most powerful man on earth, we can get down to hating the foreigners. Other than the tragedy that unites them and a supposedly irresistible regular guy machismo, neither of them has any particular character to speak of. President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) and Secret Service tough dude Mike Banning (Gerard Butler). In this case, though, the males so provided are two: U.S. The opening of the narrative works quickly to off a female character, knowing that there's nothing like dropping a dead woman on the screen to provide any males nearby with wounds, motivation, and depth. And yet, there's something particularly, tellingly horrifying in the way it takes that dumb, by-the-numbers action movie, and turns it into a paean-or if you prefer, an exposé-of our national character. On the one hand, it's just another dumb, by-the-numbers action movie. With that synopsis, you could pretty much write the script yourself. It is simply Die Hard in the White House. Trust me, there is nothing interesting about it. That probably makes the movie sound more interesting than it is.