WHITE HOUSE DOWN

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The DC Crime Ring Eats Its Own
Hollywood Can’t Help Taking Notice

Copycat redundancies to the recent “Olympus Has Fallen” aside, “White House Down” is an unintentionally laughable action movie that wallows in involuntary cynicism about how America — or screenwriter James Vanderbilt at least — views the White House as the world’s biggest crime ring.

Buried in a shallow grave just beneath its veneer of absurdly cheesy Americana platitudes lays mocking subtext, twitching with spastic gestures and pointing awkwardly at a corrupt political system eating itself from the inside out.

U.S. President Jack William Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) can’t wait to explain his occupational predicament to the first pair of ears that comes along. “The first term is all about getting reelected,” he tells an upstart Secret Service agent before explaining that now, during his second term, he is finally ready to do something that will make a difference. Sound familiar? You’d think he was petitioning for single-term-limits for the Presidential office.

Interestingly, the ever-buff Channing Tatum dons the Edward Snowden mantle as John Cale [no, not the Welsh composer and musician of Velvet Underground fame, although that would have been interesting]. Like Snowden, Cale has a history of not finishing things — e.g., school. But our would-be Secret Service agent bodyguard has friends [mainly female] in high places. He went to college with White House Secret Service official Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), one of President Sawyer’s right-hand agents.

Still, when Cale arrives at the White House for a job interview with Agent Finnerty, with his 12-year-old daughter Emily (Joey King) in tow, she quickly gives him the thumbs-down — so much for friends in high places. Cale is a perfect outlier, ready to pounce for the true cause of liberty when he gets a chance.

On this particular day a crew of generic baddies sneak into the White House to hack into its computers, take hostages, and see how far down the line of presidential succession they can move the title of Commander-In-Chief. Naturally, Cale’s daughter falls into the hostage category while our able-bodied hero takes personal responsibility for getting the President out alive while all hell breaks out around them.

You can’t help but transpose Barak Obama into Foxx’s character during goofy action sequences, as when Cale and President Sawyer climb up through an elevator shaft. The effect is mildly comical if only because it’s so hard to imagine Obama doing anything so remotely athletic and risky.

Although its plot gymnastics are idiotic to the point of parody, “White House Down” makes a smart point about how vicious, cunning, and vengeful America’s power-hungry politicians are. They all want to be king for a day, and don’t give a damn about how many civilians get crushed, punished, or put out of work and home in the process. The best thing this cinematic assault-on-the-senses has going for it is its title. Like Edward Snowden, America is on its own and there are very few places to hide.

Rated PG-13. 137 mins.

THE GREY

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Chaotic Nature
Joe Carnahan Explores the Minds of the Walking Wounded
By Cole Smithey

A strand of “Moby Dick” runs through director/co-writer Joe Carnahan’s wild and wooly tale of survival in the Alaskan wilderness. Like “Moby Dick” this amorphous story is an anti-narrative made up of dark encounters with nature at her cruelest. The alpha male leader of a pack of hungry wolves becomes the focal point for a group of plane-crash survivors trying to walk out of a vast snow-covered trap.

John Ottway (Liam Neeson) is an emotionally broken sharpshooter hired by an Alaskan oil company to protect its workers from bears and wolves, which attack without a moment’s notice. The ever-watchable Neeson easily fills the demands of his troubled character’s wolf-like place as the alpha to a group of flawed human males — whose number steadily diminishes.

Joe Carnahan (known for his uncompromising crime drama “Narc”) puts his audience through an episode of pure terror early in the film. After briefly contemplating suicide outside a rowdy oil refinery bar, John Ottway treasures memories of his eloigned wife while riding a private airplane carrying oil workers. Jolts of vomit-inducing turbulence rattle the passengers’ quickly fraying nerves. Just as Ottway falls asleep the plane goes into a fuselage-ripping plunge. Gravity and velocity become monsters of colossal fury. Luggage and bodies are suspended in midair in one of the most spectacular plane crash scenes ever filmed. The effect is truly terrifying.

Don’t look for “The Grey” to be shown as an in-flight movie. The cinematic experience is as close to the reality of enduring an actual plane crash as you’d ever want to get. Miraculously there are survivors amid the strewn luggage, twisted bits of metal, and bloody body parts which corrupt an otherwise peaceful expanse of snow-covered ground. Awakening from one nightmare into another, eight shocked men begin to pick up items of clothing and supplies they desperately need to go on living. Ottway thinks to collect the wallets of the corpses, to return to their family members should the opportunity arise.

The assembly of blue-collar roughnecks runs the gambit. Diaz (Frank Grillo) is a tattooed ex-con whose personal insecurities threaten to undermine Ottway’s obvious status as the group leader. Ottway’s uses his thorough knowledge of wolf pack mentality and behavior to counsel the group to quickly abandon the crash site in favor of shelter above the area’s distant tree line. The wolves, Ottway believes, are more interested in protecting their territory than hunting down the men as food. Stormy whiteout conditions threaten to bury the men in a 40-below-zero grave of snow.

Violent encounters between the wolves and their human prey allows Carnahan to dig deep into his bag of action tricks. Blood flies through the air like freezing mists of tempered humidity. The confident helmer displays a greater kinship to Sam Peckinpah’s muscular approach to cinema than any other filmmaker working today. Every gutsy action scene is crafted with gritty detail and a muscular unpredictability that dares the audience to guess where it will end up.

Punch-drunk suspense sets in as the film’s subtext of thematic discourse about subjects ranging from self-deception to religious belief to what it takes to be a man get bandied about. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi (“Warrior”) lends his keen eye for magnificent compositions to expertly contextualize the men’s excruciating journey of inexorable attrition.

“The Grey” is an old-fashioned survival movie in the vein of John Huston’s 1956 version of the Melville classic. The glory of the adventure comes from what lies buried deep within the psyches of its personalities, and branded in their facial expressions. John Ottway remembers the only poem his stoic father ever wrote as it hung framed on a wall in his dad’s study.

“Once more into the fray. Into the last good fight I’ll ever know. Live and die on this day. Live and die on this day.”

Watch this movie to discern the poem’s meaning for the wealth of import Carnahan and his filmmaking cohorts intend.

Rated R. 117 mins.

ROBIN HOOD

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What's So Funny 'Bout War, Greed, and Ignorance
Robin Hood Prequel is an Uphill Slog
By Cole Smithey

For as muddled as its medieval politics are, thanks to Brian Helgeland's scattershot screenplay, director Ridley Scott's cloud-covered history of Robin Longstride's path to outlaw legend soars whenever Cate Blanchett takes the screen as Maid Marion. The same filmmaker responsible for "Alien," "Black Hawk Down," and "Gladiator" works in a brown and gray palate of natural light to conjure up 13th century England.

The ever humorless Russell Crowe is a paunchy archer in King Richard the Lion Heart's army when the ruler (Danny Huston) is killed during a generic battle involving gallons of hot oil, arrows, and muddy swords. Entrusted to deliver a dying soldier's sword to his father Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow) in Nottingham, Robin (Crowe) and his mercenary companions take the opportunity to return King Richard's crown to England's callow new leader King John (Oscar Isaac).

Upon receiving his son Robert's sword that bears the inscription "rise and rise again until lambs become lions," the blind Sir Walter insists that Robin impersonate Robert — something Robin has already been doing to avoid military punishment — and also pretend to be husband to Lady Marion so that Loxely's land will not be taken away when he dies. It's from this overlong set up that the prequel takes its shape.

In an overworked effort at making Robin Hood a somber man with heavy emotional baggage about his father, and an idealized sense of justice, the filmmakers have drained all the fun out of a story that should at least have some amount of proletariat joy. While it's true that this Robin Hood is unlike any you've seen before, it's also one that you may not want to see again.  

The severe lack of color in art director David Allday designs, and in Janty Yates's dull costumes, contributes to the film's drab visual droning effect. Without sufficiently supported subplots or developed secondary characters to cue the action, the lack of color takes a toll on the audience's ability to discern the stripe of ambiguous characters in the run up to the film's battle climax. Musically, the film fares considerably better with Marc Streitenfeld's vibrant original score lending surefooted counterpoint to the film's poignant underbelly of social oppression.

However much some audiences might want "Robin Hood" to be "Gladiator-in- Sherwood-Forest," Ridley Scott has kept his head about him in delivering expedient battle scenes that resonate with the quickness of the arrows being launched. There is none of the grainy action-for-action's-sake digital excess that weighed so heavy in Scott's "Black Hawk Down." And yet we never get to enjoy the "stealing from the rich to give to the poor" aspect of the Robin Hood legend that audiences might rightfully expect.

Mark Addy's Firar Tuck barely takes a nip at the bottle and isn't anywhere near as jolly as his reputation precedes. Robin's other three would-be Merry Men (Scott Grimes, Kevin Durand, and Alan Doyle) are all but lost in the shuffle as Robin takes on his father's mantle of social activist. By the time Robin Hood becomes a military leader in a fierce beach battle against the French army, we get the feeling that things can only go downhill for the outlaw's future prospects.

There are three or four great scenes, and all involve Cate Blanchett and Max von Sydow. Seen through this relief, "Robin Hood" should more rightly have taken on the film's intended title of "Nottenham" and been more about the father and daughter who bestow upon Robin his humanity. But even that would leave out the film's most glaring missing component, humor.

Rated PG-13. 140 mins.