BEFORE: Today I finally got my watchlist back down to 150 films, which is where it was at the end of regulation play in 2014. It took me over five months of daily viewing to get back there, so the last few months must have been a really productive time for adding things to the list - even if I've added only one film for every two I've watched, that still makes the progress agonizingly slow. But now that I'm back to 150, every time I can bring that number down by one, it will count as positive progress for this year. It's still impossible for me to finish within calendar year 2015, but I can try go get close, and for the rest of the year, I can be happy that the list has never been smaller than it is at any given time.
Today I'm in the middle of a James Woods triple play, as he carries over from "True Crime" - but with "Against All Odds" last week, he's really showing up four times in a 7-day period. And if you want to drive a guy with OCD crazy, just put 4 James Woods films on his list, but make it impossible for him to get them all next to each other. Same deal with Matt Craven, today he makes his third appearance in a week, but only two of them are together. Aarrrrgh!
THE PLOT: While on a tour of the White House with his young daughter, a Capitol policeman springs into action to save his child and protect the president from a heavily armed group of paramilitary invaders.
AFTER: This seems a little bit off topic, but it's really not. It's got military action, like "Starman" did, it's got terrorism, like "Arlington Road" did, and a divorced father trying to re-connect with his daughter, just like "True Crime" did. Of course, Clint Eastwood's character just took his daughter around the zoo, and Channing Tatum's character drags his daughter along when he interviews for a job with the Secret Service.
This puts both of them in the White House at the worst possible time (Hey, while we're here, let's take the guided tour - what could possibly go wrong?), which is just before a terrorist attack. But let's be politically correct here, these are not international terrorists, not a Muslim in the bunch - they're Americans, but they represent - well, that would be telling. Let's just say they work for a faction that wants to keep us in a state of war, because that's good for business. Something tells me that there are not only better, easier ways to accomplish this, but also that most American businesses would be able to re-adjust if a Middle East war suddenly ended. Taking the White House hostage to further these goals seems a bit like chopping off a foot when you only need to trim a toenail.
Anyway, while it's not the first film to depict an African-American president, I think it may be the first to show one so obviously based on Barack Obama. Oh, they call him President Sawyer, but he's clearly Obama, right down to the nicotine gum.
Otherwise, this is really just "Die Hard" set at the White House - but you do get to learn a lot about the White House, assuming that the sets they built are accurate. You get to see the West Wing, the pool, the Rose Garden, even the high-security areas, and you pretty much get to see them all get blown up, or otherwise trashed.
There's so much action here, but that's a tricky thing to champion. It's definitely a non-stop thrill ride, but if you put TOO much action in a film, it starts to seem illogical that so much can happen in the span of one day, plus it turns the regular people into cartoonish superheroes. Plus there are a lot of familiar action-movie clichés here, like having villains that can shoot hundreds of bullets and miss the hero nearly every time, and heroes who can take out multiple bad guys with just one magazine. That and a few other things I've seen before, kept this from scoring higher.
I haven't seen "Olympus Has Fallen, nor do I have a copy yet, so I'll have to do a comparison between that one and this one, some time in the future.
Also starring Channing Tatum (last seen in "This Is the End"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "Jarhead"), Maggie Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Hysteria"), Jason Clarke (last seen in "The Great Gatsby"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Random Hearts"), Joey King (last seen in "Oz the Great and Powerful"), Jimmi Simpson (last seen in "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter"), Lance Reddick, Matt Craven (last seen in "Jacob's Ladder"), Michael Murphy, Jake Weber, Peter Jacobson, Gabrielle Beauvais (last seen in "Flight"), Rachelle Lefevre, Nicolas Wright, Kevin Rankin, with a cameo from Ben Mankiewicz (one of the hosts on TCM).
RATING: 6 out of 10 javelin missiles
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