In each case, the presidential quarters are torched, shot, and otherwise blasted to smithereens. Variations in sensibility aside, the destruction remains uniform in Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. Intended or not, the film is a straight-up comedy. But, by the time Jamie Foxx's wisecracking president throws on a pair of Jordans and rides around his front lawn with a rocket launcher, any claims the film might have to progressive politics are almost literally torpedoed. Its premise is actually more left-leaning than you might expect - the homegrown terrorists are red-state extremists funded by American arms manufacturers. It plays every action-movie convention for comedy, relishing the contrivances of its by-the-numbers screenplay as if it were a Wayans family production. White House Down takes the approach one step further. Olympus Has Fallen is, in some ways, a genre film par excellence, keeping the narrative lean and the action deliriously over-the-top, and if it seems informed by typical rah-rah nationalism, it at least treats its right-wing embellishments so lightly that it practically qualifies as camp.
But when North Korean terrorists take over the White House and kidnap the president and his son, it's up to Banning, naturally, to swoop in, save the day, and redeem himself in the process. Olympus Has Fallen stars an exaggeratedly grizzled Gerard Butler as former secret service operative Mike Banning, a highly trained bodyguard resigned to working an unglamorous desk job after failing to protect the president's wife.
These films, though made on widely different budgets and, as critics have already observed, from widely different ideological perspectives, share one overarching quality: Both are obsessed with seeing the White House obliterated spectacularly. The phenomenon recurs once again this year, when Americans will be treated to two separate films about terrorists storming Washington: Antoine Fuqua's Olympus Has Fallen, released to middling reception in March, and Roland Emmerich's inflated summer blockbuster White House Down, which opens this weekend. Every so often, Hollywood accidentally doubles down on an idea so obviously that it becomes an industry joke: It's impossible, even now, to think about Red Planet without thinking of Mission to Mars, A Bug's Life without Antz, Deep Impact without Armageddon, Striptease without Showgirls.