Traditionally, Hollywood loathes duplications. Projects will be ruthlessly junked if something similar is in the pipeline elsewhere. But sometimes pile-ups are unavoidable if there is sufficient momentum and clout behind competing movie developments with the same idea. And so it has proved with Roland Emmerich's White House Down, almost a carbon-copy of Antoine Fuqua's Olympus Has Fallen, released earlier this year. As before, the US president is under attack from terrorists in his own home – that is, the White House – and a lone secret service guy, looking for personal redemption, can save him. Now it's Jamie Foxx playing the commander in chief nursing a radical new Middle East "peace plan", and hunky Channing Tatum is his loyal special agent.
It has to be said that Emmerich, that master of disaster, brings more bangs and more bucks to his version. There are a lot more pointless explosions, more crashing helicopters, more gleaming-black SUVs turning somersaults in mid-air. It's on a bigger scale, though restricted by the single location, and this is probably hokum of a finer grade than its rival. But the basic silliness of all those CGI effects and all the digitally fabricated action mean that real thrills – dependent on real, believable jeopardy – are not on offer: just cheerfully absurd spectacle and a little bit of humour.
ng a ball) from assorted baddies and crackpots hell-bent on increasingly bonkers acts of mindless destruction. It starts with handguns, but soon escalates to massive rocket-launchers, exploding helicopters, marauding tanks and even nuclear warheads. James Woods chews up the West Wing scenery, Maggie Gyllenhaal takes up the slack as the secret service whiz keeping her cool on a very bad day, and Richard Jenkins manages to keep a splendidly straight face even as the flag-waving Die Hard riffs are pushed way beyond the point of parody. I laughed a lot – and I suspect Emmerich did too. And then everything blew up. Again.