http://bananasaboutmovies.com/2013/04/2 ... en-review/
Gerard Butler is Mike Banning, hotshot secret service agent to President Harvey Dent. Like most agents who protect the president, he has a little curly wire poking out of his ear which he presses with his finger to speak to other agents with curly wires sticking out of their ears. When he’s not doing that, he’s enjoying vaguely homoerotic sparring matches in the president’s private ring. That’s boxing ring.
During a blizzard, the president’s limo crashes off a bridge. Butler manages to save the president, but not the first lady, some woman called Ashley Judd. I think she was famous once. Butler blames himself for her death, and decides he can’t protect President Harvey Dent any more.
So he quits, and gets a desk job. But then the unthinkable happens, and a bunch of North Koreans go and attack the bloody White House!
t’s here, that I would like to take pause, and dwell upon a question that I hope to have answered by the end of the review. That question is…
DOES MIKE BANNING FIND REDEMPTION BY VIOLENTLY STABBING NORTH KOREANS THROUGH THE BRAIN?
Credit where it’s due. The opening assault on the White House is a gloriously tasteless epic of mass destruction. Members of the public get torn to shreds by bullets. North Korean suicide bombers (is there even such a thing?) blow themselves to shit in the name of supreme leader Kim Jong-un. Secret service agents fall to the floor like so many bowling pins. North Koreans pull rocket launchers out of their pants and fire them straight through the White House’s front door.
Some of the CGI in that assault is terrible, probably some of the worst I’ve seen. It’s like it’s being generated on the fly, on a Dell PC, in a greenhouse, on a summer’s day, using a ten-year old graphics card, with a broken fan. At some points, I was waiting for the textures to pop in. Still, it’s trashy, it’s OTT, it’s insane, and it’s great fun (but it does make you think that maybe the security arrangements for the president’s house could do with bit of fine tuning).
After that, it’s all downhill. The director, Antoine Fuqua, has blown his wad too early. Even though the idea of “Die Hard in the White House” seems like a great one, it’s corridors and offices don’t really lend themselves to inventive action set pieces. It’s no Nakatomi Plaza, and all the vertigo inducing threat that particular skyscraper represents.
The film devolves into a series of smaller, lacklustre skirmishes, and dull-witted one liners. This leads to a final confrontation between Butler and the bad guy (diamond face dude from the worst Bond movie ever) that looks like Fuqua was bored, and just wanted to get the film over and done with. Join the club!