Ugh… looks like it’s 1996 all over again. Once again, Hollywood has decided to turn our nation’s capital into a petri dish of destruction just so they could film multiple epic disaster movies that will inevitably return hundreds of millions to their already well-lined pockets. And Lord knows they’re not going to foot the bill to fix up Washington once they’re through firebombing it. I don’t want to name names, but the people running Tinseltown aren’t exactly the type to eagerly pick up a check.

So here I am, once again galvanizing the philanthropic efforts to rebuild the Jewel on the Potomac, following this year’s one-two punch of Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. It should be a breeze though compared to what I had to go through in ’96, when Washington was flattened by Independence Day and Mars Attacks! That senseless destruction prompted me to jump through an untold number of hoops in order to organize an NBC telethon headlined by Garry Shandling, Ben Stein, and Coolio. However, its unmitigated success made it well worth it, and the city was returned to its full glory thanks to the $11,000 we raised. By the middle of 1997, Washington was once again brimming with Japanese tourists armed with state-of-the-art cameras taking photos of things they don’t realize aren’t interesting. In 2013, the magic of technology makes the act of giving much more streamlined, so if you want to help the rebuilding efforts this time around, simply text “Dollarz4Barack” to 20500, and you’ll be billed for a tenner on your next statement. I’d greatly appreciate your help with this, so if money’s a bit tight right now, please contact Montel Williams for some quick cash.

On this year’s District-destroying movies themselves, I refuse to watch Olympus Has Fallen. This is because the star of that film, Gerard Butler, is repeatedly cheapening his legacy by doing movies where he is forced to sport a faux-American accent. Many of his fellow UK countrymen do the same, but it’s unacceptable for Butler, whose native tongue was so exquisitely executed in RocknRolla that any other dialect streaming forth from his lips is a cinematic travesty. However, I have no problem with a muscle-bound Channing Tatum and sensually smooth Jamie Foxxxxx, so White House Down is right in my wheelhouse. I also don’t have a problem with director Roland Emmerich, who has admittedly brought us countless stinkers (including #2 on the Dueling Chaps CHAMP scale), though has also blessed us with Independence Day, which is the greatest movie of all time. I have personally viewed it every day since July 2, 1996 (excluding Islamic days of fasting). If you are also a proud member of the Jeff Goldblum/Will Smith army, then there are plenty of little ID4 references in White House Down for you to feast upon, Easter eggs the producers may not even realize they put in. In increasing order of obscurity:

1. Channing Tatum kicking and talking trash to dead terrorist = Will Smith kicking and talking trash to dead alien (obvious)

2. A submarine commander disputing information being conveyed by a lower officer as they stare at a display monitor getting progressively redder

3. The First Lady taking off a shoe in a hotel room while talking on the phone to her husband

If you spot any more ID4 nods, be sure to post them on our Geocities page.

White House Down gets off to way too slow a start. We’re introduced to Jamie Foxx as President James Sawyer, a dead ringer for Barack Obama, except if Obama had failed to gain admittance to the University of Chicago and instead had to attend DePaul. President Sawyer expresses even broader, more non-specific social ideals than the real POTUS, as vocalized by Foxx doing his best pseudo-white guy impression to correctly simulate Obama’s actual pseudo-white guyness. It’s super-preachy, and it’s tough to tell early on whether it’s tongue in cheek, or if we’re meant to think we deserve the bad stuff about to hit us. Beyond the Prez, there’s a ton of characters to introduce, and they all get their fair shake of screentime. This is far from a tightly-wound drama, so surely many of the generic roles could have been merged to get the movie under two hours, a mark which it easily exceeds. A lengthy setup sequence would have been ok if the bad-guys-to-be were doing something interesting, but they’re not; they’re just a bunch of scowling white dudes who move around the White House with inexplicable impunity.

The headliner is of course Channing Tatum, the current personification of Western civilization’s avant-garde. He portrays John Cale, a Capitol Policeman who’s interviewing at the White House for a Secret Service position. Cale is accompanied by his young daughter Emily, portrayed by some chick who is a star in the making. She holds her own with Channing early on as they exchange some father-daughter banter, and eventually goes toe-to-toe with James Woods at the film’s climax and never blinks. The Emily character was likely conceived as an obligatory plot device to serve as John Cale’s familial foil, but you’ll end up caring about her welfare more than anyone else’s; she’s the most real in a movie otherwise populated by caricatures. As long as puberty sets her goodies in the proper position, we’ve got an A-lister ten years from now. You heard it here first.

Though the movie kicks off with a tortuously lazy pace, it pays off. Big time. When the pleasant introductions are formally concluded with a barrage of explosions and gunfire, it sets in motion one of the best “bad guys taking over” sequences in action cinema history. The center of Washington comes under terrorist attack on all fronts, and we see the full range of its effects with relentless intensity. We move from the machine-gun firefights on the ground, to the President on lock-down in the Oval Office, to the Vice President getting jetted away in Air Force One to preserve the chain of command. The pacing seems real-timey, in a docu-drama sort of way. You witness America’s command-and-control structure progressively crumble as the terrorists’ grasp on the capital gradually reaches its full fruition. Even though the whole thing is popcorn-ey and fun, White House Down is probably the best fictional representation of the total confusion that must have gripped American leaders on 9/11.

Cale and Sawyer inevitably get paired up in the pandemonium, setting in motion yet another beautiful white chocolate buddy flick that all of us true supporters of Emancipation can’t help but love. This is the type of movie that should get beamed to the heavens to show our future alien overlords the best of America and American cinema. The Tatum/Foxx chemistry is everything you’d expect from two guys who know they’re gonna kill it at the club later that night. It’s far from a thespianic masterpiece, but we’ve got two guys here who are generally good actors and understand what’s funny and fun, and thus we end up with a movie that’s funny and fun. The Cale/Sawyer roles are very well-managed; their screentime is appropriately limited, else the film would have probably degraded into forgettable Tatum/Foxx banter as they dig into their B material. This is a long movie, and the fact that the camera can shift away from the two stars for good portions of the runtime without losing anything speaks to its overall quality.

The whole thing is cartoonish in the crazy action movie sort of way, from the giant fonts on computer screens to the smallish intellects of the characters. They all seemingly drank their way to 2.6 GPAs at Big-12 schools and have somehow managed to land jobs as either terrorist masterminds or heads of state. This is all ok though, because the general lack of competence is equally distributed amongst the good guys and bad guys, so we get a nice little battle. The terrorists don’t even know what the plan is, because each individual terrorist has their own, yet they all agreed to come together for reasons that are never explained. Likewise, the U.S. government apparently doesn’t have plans for defending its sovereign soil or succession of power, despite it being the sole function of 85% of the Constitution. The biggest upside to this “nobody knows what’s going on” situation is that it allows for a crazy grab-bag of insane action, since everybody just pretty much rolls their own. Reality was no object (see the headline), and the ridiculousness makes me suspect that Chanel West Coast had a strong presence at the screenwriters’ table.

It’s super-wacky. It’s super-awesome. The fact that this movie is probably closer to reality than fiction may be unsettling, but it’s not. It’s refreshing. The guy currently in control of the nuclear launch sequencing at NORAD is the same guy who peed on your Life and Ecology textbook in sixth grade. Sure, that dude’s one keypress away from wiping out Southeast Asia, but if he can land that gig, then the sky’s the limit for the rest of us. White House Down is quite simply every Bruce Willis movie that’s ever been made rolled into one, so if you’ve done your civic duty of viewing at least 40% of his catalogue, then you’ve seen this all before. Though if you’re the type of guy who appreciates a good Bruce Willis flick (i.e. a guy), then WHD is an absolute must-watch.