“Mustang, this is Big Top, bringing out the full package,” coincidentally, is also what I say into a walkie-talkie right before I get arrested for indecent exposure.
As you can see, the trailer has just hit for Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, starring Gerard Butler as a Secret Service agent stuck in the White House after terrorists take over and Speaker of the House Morgan Freeman has to become acting president. If you ask me, Morgan Freeman becoming president seems like a win-win for everyone, but according to screenwriters Creighton Rothenburger (HOLY LACROSSE NAME, BATMAN!) and Katherine Benedkt, this is considered “conflict.” Moreover, this seems to have everything you’d expect in an action movie:
It’s Die Hard in a _____!
Explosions.
CUT TO: “…Oh. My. God.”
But what it isn’t is White House Down, the original Die Hard-in-the-White-House movie starring our boy Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx (yes, this is a real movie, with Independence Day‘s Roland Emmerich directing). Does Olympus Has Fallen have C-Tates as agent Cole Baretta? Does it have Chet Haze as Cole Baretta’s protege, agent-in-training JJ Streetz? Does it have Cole Baretta’s partner, a talking pit bull voiced by Pit Bull? Does it have zombie attacks, or the ghosts of Tupac and Biggie showing up to give Cole Baretta advice like Obi-wan Kenobi? No, it has none of these things. Granted, unless Sony gives Burnsy that re-write job he’s been pushing for, neither will White House Down. But White House Down gave us the room to dream, and that’s what’s important. So Antoine Fuquoff with this non-C-Tates-having garbage.