Jamie Foxx, left, and Channing Tatum star in “White House Down.” (AP)
You couldn’t ask for a more fun summer popcorn movie than “White House Down.” The buddy action-comedy teams the ever-ingratiating Channing Tatum, as a hunky, off-duty DC cop, with Jamie Foxx, slyly amusing as President Sawyer, a very thinly disguised version of our current chief executive.
The latest epic from master of disaster Roland Emmerich is his most entertaining since “Independence Day” — amusingly referenced by a White House tour guide in the new film, which is a lot funnier than you’d guess from some of the trailers.
Tatum’s cop, John Cale, has snuck onto a tour with his precocious 12-year-old daughter Emily (the winning Joey King) after blowing an interview to join the presidential Secret Service detail.
Cale gets a second chance to show his mettle when terrorists — who have smuggled a truckload of explosives and weapons into the White House under the pretense of a sound upgrade for the screening room — take the Lincoln-loving president hostage after instantly killing off all the agents charged with protecting him.
It’s a hoot when President Sawyer, who very obviously lacks any military training, tries to aim a rocket launcher at a vehicle full of bad guys on the South Lawn of the White House. And even funnier when the president puts on his glasses before firing an assault weapon at a baddie who has Cale pinned down in the kitchen.
While Afghanistan War hero Cale and a fearful Sawyer are hiding in elevator shafts and trying to sneak out through an underground tunnel (we’re told JFK used it to smuggle Marilyn Monroe into the White House), Cale’s spunky daughter Emily is doing her own patriotic duty.
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Separated from her father, she alerts the world to the White House home invasion by uploading video from her cellphone to YouTube, provoking a full-blown constitutional crisis.
The hawkish vice president (Michael Murphy) takes command and orders an attack on the White House, where the terrorists are holding 60 hostages in addition to the president and demanding $500 million in cash.
This preposterous scheme is being masterminded by the retiring veteran head of the Secret Service detail, who is dying and seems to blame the president for his soldier son’s death in the Middle East. He’s played with enormous relish by James Woods, who not only chews scenery but practically inhales the Oval Office.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is cast as Woods’ dumbstruck lieutenant, who says things like “I had Thanksgiving dinner at their home every year!’’ and unwisely brings in Woods’ wife to try and reason with her renegade husband. Richard Jenkins portrays the untrustworthy House Speaker, who gets sworn in as president at one point and handed the nuclear launch codes.
Tatum winningly plays the straight man in what amounts to the “Airplane!” of political thrillers like this spring’s “Olympus Has Fallen.” While there’s more than a little of a “Die Hard” vibe here (more than in “Die Hard 5,” actually), Emmerich and screenwriter James Vanderbilt wisely don’t try to turn Tatum into a junior Bruce Willis.
It’s left to others to say things like “The president is bombing the White House!!???” while Tatum, in a ripped shirt, is busy trying to prevent the bad guys from shooting down Black Hawk helicopters from the White House roof or is setting fire to the Lincoln Bedroom to distract the terrorists.
“White House Down” is the funniest thing I’ve seen this year — but possibly not quite as funny to those not amused by the idea of a liberal president taken hostage by a group of right-wing terrorists bent on turning over the reins of government to the military-industrial complex.