This looked like a movie I’d really like. An attack on our soil, a patriotic, badass response, and Morgan Freeman as a high-ranking official yelling at people.
What it actually is, though, is a bad mashup of Rambo and Die Hard, set in the White House.
Gerard Butler as a secret service agent. Really? A character named Mike Banning with a bad accent? Not buying it.
Aaron Eckhart and Ashley Judd as President and First Lady? Riiiiiiiiiiight. When have you seen people anywhere close to that attractive in office?
And then the Rambo/Die Hard effect: Banning survives a ridiculous number of attacks, is the only one left to save the world (but not really the world, because it’s just the White House), saves a kid, saves the President, and survives. I especially like the scene where all the idiot secret service agents run out onto the front steps with no formation or concept of weapons, into a barrage of high-caliber bullets, presumably to jack up the number of bodies Banning has to step over to enter the building, for effect. Lame.
Tons of inconsistencies and other annoyances as well.
- Freeman’s character (Speaker of the House) negotiates with terrorists, then doesn’t, then does. WTF?
- The White House bunker is pretty damn easy to get in and out of, apparently.
- When two of six SEAL team helicopters get blown out of the sky by some super weapon, the obvious, and surely realistic, military tactic is to keep attacking with the other four until you’re down to only one. Then retreat.
- Gerard Butler as a secret service agent. Yes, I have to mention it again. It’s that bad.
- The codes to the stupid disarming mechanism for our nukes, which, of course, if activated, would detonate them on our own soil. The whole concept is just absurd.
Okay. I’m done. It’s lame. Skip it.
Shit, G.I. Joe is going to be bad, but at least I know that and go into it with different expectations.