I come at this from the rare perspective of having seen White House Down first. I actually didn’t care for White House Down. As ridiculous as it got, I didn’t think it got ridiculous enough. The car chase on the lawn was a fun idea but certainly wasn’t shot cohesively enough to deliver a thrill. The helicopter assault and the blatant flag waving were good ideas but I don’t even think they had a sense of irony about having a flag waving scene in a White House movie. So all my hopes for Die Hard in the White House rest on Olympus Has Fallen.
Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is taken off the president (Aaron Eckhart)’s Secret Service detail after a spoilery incident in the opening scenes. Mike is a man of action and needs to be back in the game, but it’s a good thing he’s not when Korean terrorists take over the White House. During the initial attack, Mike gets himself into the White House so he can rescue the president’s son and take out the terrorists one by one.
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For the 45 minutes White House Down took to set up the layout of the White House and all the tidbits it would use later, it still never created a sense of geography, how president Jamie Foxx and secret agent Channing Tatum got from elevators to kitchens to hallways, etc. Olympus foregoes any of the blatant setup, yet when Mike is running around the White House I feel like I always know where he’s going. At least when a fight goes from a hallway into a dining room, I believe that that could be the proximity of rooms in the White House layout. More importantly, Mike knows where he’s going. I trust Mike. Mike can sneak down a dark hall and get into position to snipe a terrorist and I don’t question how he got there. He just knows his way around.
The fights are much better in Olympus Has Fallen. This isn’t groundbreaking stuff. It just looks like Mike has a repertoire of moves, as in he uses different ones in each fight scene. The fights in White House Down looked like the same three moves they teach every actor for their fight scenes, which is weird because Tatum has done a fighting movie (I believe it was called Step Up Into The Ring) so we’ve seen him fight well. And even though Olympus director Antoine Fuqua likes to shoot handheld, I could see all the moves in each fight scene and I know what Mike did to break out of a hold or turn the tables on his opponent. It’s possible to be gritty and clear. Also, when Mike is fighting in a particular room of the White House, he actually uses presidential stuff to win the fight. In White House Down they just use some pots and pans from the kitchen, and I think the tour guide used some government prop once.
The violence in Olympus Has Fallen has a grim sense of humor, or if not humor, escalation. When Mike tries to rescue a gunshot victim and the victim just gets shots some more, I wouldn’t say that’s funny like the human shield in Total Recall or ED-209’s first victim, but it gives you a sense of, “This is some serious shit.” Our hero doing the right thing might ultimately be useless with death this pervasive, so maybe he should just focus on the primary task.
The scale of Olympus Has Fallen is just as grand as White House Down, to the point of even doing the same gag with helicopters being shot down from the White House roof. I think Olympus creates a better sense of the destruction around D.C. as well, with cars on the street shattered and pedestrians gunned down in the crossfire. Even if the explosions were CGI, the wrecked cars were real. It’s not in a gratuitous bloodlust way. It really creates a sense of epic scope, as opposed to just some actors in a soundstage that looks like the White House. The terrorists’ plot has a built in ticking clock to it as well. They need to get three launch codes from different White House officials, so each time they get one it automatically ramps up the tension. White House Down had Foxx and Tatum loosely running around the White House until they ran out of places to run or people to fight.
The CGI is bad in both movies, or perhaps I should just blame the over-reliance on CGI. I mean, if you’re not going to be able to make a bomber gunning down the White House roof look real, maybe you shouldn’t put that sequence in your movie. Of course that sequence can only exist because of CGI, so it better look at least as good as the miniature White House blowing up in Independence Day 17 years ago. (See? I give Roland Emmerich credit for something.) The attack on D.C. in Olympus is an exciting sequence in construction, but all the planes look like they’re pasted in from different movies, and it certainly never looks like real gunfire. It’s just an orange blob that’s supposed to signify they’re shooting.
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The Blu-ray looks great. Particularly since most of the film takes place at night, you can see everything clearly in the dark shadows of the White House. The shadows are deep black. It’s a brand new release so the overall quality is perfect, clear and crisp. All the bonus features are relatively short, with an 11 minute “making of” the longest of the bunch. I watched the visual effects featurettes in full to address my issues with the CGI. They did point out that a lot more of the movie was CGI than I thought. I just took it for granted as background and location work. So most of that looked convincing. It was just the helicopters and planes and smoke and gunfire that looked like a cartoon and they were oblivious to that. The blooper reel also interested me because several of the takes were ruined by crew members walking through the shot. So that still happens.
Olympus Has Fallen is definitely the Volcano to White House Down’s Dante’s Peak, which I say as no reflection on either films’ financial or critical success, but simply because I like Volcano more. I could have just evaluated Olympus on its own merits, but if I was handed such a demonstrative example of how this same movie does not work, I might as well use it. Plus this saves me from having to weigh in on White House Down. Oh, but I did call that one Shite House Down. I thought that was pretty clever, so I’d hate to waste that.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
