BURDEN OF ROOF

Opening this weekend:

Roofman--The story of Jeff Manchester, known as "Roofman," sounds like a tall tale. After serving in the U.S. Army, the California native robbed dozens of McDonalds restaurants, among other businesses, usually by cutting through the roof before opening time, politely and apologetically sticking up the arriving employees at gunpoint, locking them in the freezer, and looting the registers.

He was caught in North Carolina in 2000 and sentenced to 45 years in prison--his gentleman bandit routine cut no ice with the judge--but escaped in 2004. He then hid out inside a Toys "R" Us in Charlotte, subsisting on Peanut M&Ms and baby food, for around half a year.

But even that isn't the most astounding part of the story. During his Toys "R" Us residency Manchester, calling himself "John Zorn," slipped out into the community. He started attending a Presbyterian Church, dating a local single mother with two daughters, and generally acting like he was putting down roots.

The title role in this new film about Manchester's exploits seems tailor made for Channing Tatum. At one point in this film a cop remarks that Manchester is extremely smart, probably genius level, but "also an idiot." Few contemporary stars seem better equipped to get across that combination of resourceful ingenuity with extravagantly imbecilic recklessness, or of sweet, guileless, well-intentioned decency with dangerous obtuseness.

Most of Tatum's costars seem shrewdly cast to come across as sharp and intelligent by contrast to Manchester: Kirsten Dunst as Leigh, the Toys "R" Us employee to whom he takes a shine; Peter Dinklage as Mitch, the store's snide, toxic manager; LaKeith Stanfield as Manchester's shady old army buddy and Lily Collias as Leigh's elder daughter all seem, if they don't always act, dauntingly smart and perceptive. The faithful, led by Ben Mendelsohn as the pastor and Uzo Aduba as his wife, amusingly show us the seductive aggression with which a new face in church, especially a young single man, may be greeted. 

Directed by Derek Cianfrance from a script he wrote with Kirt Gunn, the movie unfolds in an America in which many of us live--fast food restaurants and chain stores and apartment buildings--but which we only occasionally see convincingly depicted. It's skillfully crafted, but it depends for its light tone on us finding Roofman lovable. Because no irrevocable tragedy resulted from Manchester's crimes, but perhaps even more importantly because he's played by Channing Tatum, we can.

THE LADY IN THE FAKE

In theaters this weekend:

Fly Me to the Moon--Scarlett Johansson plays a Madison Avenue marketing hustler brought to NASA in Florida in the late '60s to help re-sell the Apollo moon mission to the public, and thus to an increasingly reticent and tight-pursed Congress. Soon the astronauts are sporting Omega watches in print ads, and Tang drink mix is being touted as the beverage of space travelers.

Those of us who go back that far may remember this advertising blitz; I certainly consumed unhealthy quantities of Tang around that time--any quantity was probably unhealthy--because of its supposed outer space connections. But in this lavish period romcom, it's the highly fictitious set-up for the meet-cute between Johansson and Channing Tatum, as a serious-minded NASA launch director.

He falls for her at first sight, then when he learns who she is he's outraged at her interference. And it truly is outrageous; she even hires actors to play some of the less charismatic or more camera-shy NASA staffers in TV interviews, Tatum included. But of course, over time his resistance is worn down by her adorableness.

Johansson is pretty adorable, at that. She wears the chic '60s outfits like she was born for them, and her purse-lipped, mischievous little smirk is winning as always. Tatum is in his comfort zone here, too; likably bland and dim and stalwart. The stars have a comfortable romantic rapport, and they're well supported by a roster of character players, like Woody Harrelson as the jovial mystery man who hires Johansson, Jim Rash as a prima donna commercial director and Ray Romano as Tatum's loyal sidekick. There's also a gorgeous black cat.

Between the cast, the vintage atmosphere and retro styles and settings, and a terrific soundtrack, the movie, directed by Greg Berlanti (of Love, Simon) from a script by Rose Gilroy, would be ludicrous and fluffy but inoffensive enough, even charming. But in the middle of this buffoonish burlesque of NASA history, there are attempts to generate genuine drama and poignancy over the earlier tragedy of Apollo 1 in 1967 that strike a sour note.

Worse yet, in the severely overlong second half, the plot goes off the rails. Harrelson's government spook makes Johansson stage, you guessed it, a fake moon landing, as a contingency in case the real one fails. She reluctantly goes along with this, unbeknownst to Tatum, as the real landing is taking place, even though she feels like she's betraying him.

This extended finale is clumsily staged, but that's not what's offensive about it. The "Fake Moon Landing" narrative is one of the quintessential paranoid American folk legends, likely arising, I've always suspected, among the many people who insisted that the moon landing was a ridiculous folly and would never succeed--arising, like so much else in our toxic national discourse, from the common American inability to admit it when we're wrong. Fly Me to the Moon means it all facetiously, of course, but this doesn't strike me as the most auspicious time in our country's history to lend even that much credence to a conspiracy theory.

JUNGLE ALL THE WAY

Opening in theaters this weekend:

The Lost City--In old movies, lost cities and worlds and civilizations were often destroyed by a volcano at the end, as the explorers just barely escaped. It was as if, in the tradition of such storytelling, once westerners had laid eyes on an exotic unknown place, its destiny was fulfilled and it had no need to carry on existing.

This new adventure comedy, starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, is so old-school that it employs the venerable volcano device. Here, at least, it doesn't come out of left field, but is integrated into the plot; Bullock plays Loretta, a romance novelist who has been kidnapped and taken to a tropical island by a rich nutcase (Daniel Radcliffe) who believes she has the archeological translation skills to help him locate a treasure in a lost city he's unearthed. A nearby volcano, about to erupt, provides the urgency.

Tatum plays Loretta's cover model Alan, who engages a cool ex-Navy Seal mercenary (Brad Pitt) to rescue her, and tags along. Soon enough it's just Loretta and Alan, bumbling through the jungle on their own, struggling to elude the rich guy's goons. And, of course, bickering.

Directed by the brothers Aaron and Adam Yee from a script by a gaggle including Seth Gordon, Oren Uziel and Dana Fox, this film's pilferage goes beyond the volcano bit; it draws, directly or indirectly, on everything from Romancing the Stone to the Hope-Crosby Road pictures. It isn't necessarily all that much dumber than any of those movies; nonetheless it's pretty dumb.

Even so, it sort of works. Bits of the dialogue show flashes of wit, and Brad Pitt, employed to send up the sort of hypercompetent man of action that only exists in the movies, probably constitutes the flick's best joke, although the filmmakers can't resist spoiling it at the very end.

Above all, Bullock never sucks. She's been a movie star for three decades now, and she knows what she's doing; she can be silly without going shrill or cartoonish, and can modulate seamlessly from broad schtick to sweet, delicate moments. Even when a movie serves her poorly, she's consistently good company, and Tatum, with his amiable, logy-minded delivery, pairs well with her. It's also refreshing that, for a change, the leading lady is more than a decade and a half older than her love interest.

DOG OF WAR

Opening this week...

Dog--Although the title character has a name, Lulu, for most of this movie's length star Channing Tatum just refers to her by the titular monosyllable. She's a Belgian Malinois and a traumatized U.S. Army combat veteran. Briggs (Tatum), a similarly damaged former Army Ranger, agrees to drive the dog from the northwest to Nogales, Arizona to be present at the funeral of her former partner. After that, she's slated to be put down.

As you can guess, the trip does not go smoothly. Briggs and the muzzled, restrained, snarling Lulu stumble into episodic wacky adventures down the coast. They encounter woke tantric types in Portland and paranoid weed-growing hippies in northern California; Briggs even poses as a blind man, with Lulu as his service animal, to get a good hotel room in San Francisco. Through it all, of course, this boy and his dog gradually bond.

Co-directed by Tatum and co-screenwriter Reid Carolin, this movie, the release of which was delayed for more than a year, is being marketed as a comedy, and there are broad, heavy-handed scenes in which Briggs is the slapstick butt of the dog's mayhem. In general, though, the film is more poignant and compassionate than might be expected; its concern with the plight of PTSD-afflicted veterans, both two- and four-legged, is at the core of the film.

Tatum is also at the core. I've always liked him; his dim, sweet manner suggests a deep decency. But he's pretty much the whole show here. The supporting characters, like the hippies and Portlanders, are stereotypical--though not mean-spiritedly so--and also fleeting. A large percentage of the film is just Tatum, nattering away to the dog, like one does. He makes Briggs a surprisingly layered characterization, and he shows that he can carry a movie all by himself.

Well, not all by himself. Part of what makes the film so touching are the reaction shots of Lulu's soulful face. Tatum is never likely to have a more beautiful leading lady.

YETI PERSISTED; JUDGE DREAD; FANCY FOOTWORK

Opening in the Valley this weekend:

Smallfoot--The premise of this animated musical kidflick is that Yeti exist, high in the Himalayas, and that they regard us humans just as we regard them--as legendary. These furry, not-at-all-abominable snow-people have a peaceful culture on a mountaintop above a cloudbank, based on a traditional creation story drawn on flat stones worn by the "Stonekeeper." Questioning this mythology can lead to banishment.

This is what happens to our hero Migo (voiced by Channing Tatum) after he encounters a human "smallfoot" and tells his neighbors about it. But he falls in with a secret society of other Yeti who question the literal veracity of the stones, among them Meechee (Zendaya), the daughter of the Stonekeeper (Common). Migo has an adventure below the clouds with a smallfoot named Percy (James Corden), the egocentric, publicity-hungry host of an Animal-Planet-style TV show.

I didn't expect this film do go very far beyond its clever, funny basic idea; I certainly didn't expect it to be a complex satire about skepticism and rational inquiry, and the forces that oppose it. But that's what Smallfoot rather insistently is, even as it fulfills the obligatory demands of the kid movie, complete with slapstick and the occasional flatulence joke.

This conventional stuff is maybe what keeps the movie from being quite the instant classic that it wants to be. There's one terrific rap number, performed by Common, in which the Stonekeeper explains how his orthodoxy arose, and what it does for his society. Otherwise, the songs are pleasant but not really exciting.

Overall, though, Smallfoot is a very pleasant surprise, witty and generous-hearted and expansive. Also, one of the questioning Yeti--voiced by LeBron James--is named "Gwangi," presumably in homage to the allosaurus title character of 1969's The Valley of Gwangi, my childhood favorite movie. So I'd be disposed to like Smallfoot in any case.

The Children Act--Here's another story about the negotiations between reason and faith. But this Brit drama, adapted from an Ian McEwan novel, is a little less lighthearted than Smallfoot.

Emma Thompson plays Fiona, a justice in London. Fiona is routinely charged with making godlike moral rulings on, say, whether a hospital can separate conjoined twins, at the expense of one twin's life and against the wishes of the parents. Her neglected professor husband (Stanley Tucci) announces his plan to have an affair, then leaves her.

While she's in the midst of this turmoil, she's assigned the case of a seventeen-year-old boy, Adam (Fionn Whitehead), who's dying of leukemia and refuses to accept a potentially lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with the Jehovah's Witness faith in which he's been raised. Against her usual practice, Fiona decides to visit the boy in hospital, apparently to decide about the depth and seriousness of his commitment to refusing the treatment.

She finds Adam to be an ecstatic, flamboyantly self-dramatizing fellow, and the two bond at once, in part because of a shared passion for music. But it proves difficult to retreat back to her perch of legal abstraction after her short trip to the world of real humans that her decisions effect. Her connection with Adam continues after her ruling, in unexpected but painfully plausible ways.

Those of us who worship at the altar of Emma Thompson will get a potent dose of her brilliance here. It would be unfair to say that this is in spite of the material rather than because of it, but I think it's partially true, too. Although the quality and intelligence of the production is undeniable, there's something uneasily reductive about the story's approach to its central characters. The persistent suggestion is that Fiona is haunted by her failure to reproduce, and that this is what leaves her emotionally unequipped to deal with the intensity of Adam's, or indeed of her husband's, feelings for her. This feels too thin and pat for the woman that Thompson shows us.

Richard Eyre's direction is tightly proficient, the dialogue is crisp and swift--the script is by McEwan--and the supporting players are all spot-on, especially Whitehead (the everyman soldier protagonist from Dunkirk). But the movie is built around Thompson's performance; it's one of those vehicles where a poised and self-controlled central character is set on a collision course with an Oscar-clip meltdown. Thompson's trademark arch, ironic tones that modulate into a mildly beseeching singsong at the ends of sentences bespeak a self-deprecating reserve that's ripe to be punctured, and Thompson delivers as usual, pushing her performance even past this movie's limits.

Playing Sunday afternoon only at FilmBar is La Chana, the documentary on the famed Spanish flamenco dancer. Check out my review online at Phoenix Magazine.

BRICK BAT

Opening this weekend:

The Lego Batman Movie—Even though I never had Legos as a kid, nor played with them as an adult, I enjoyed 2014’s The Lego Movie and A Lego Brickumentary. I think I liked this cubist take on the Caped Crusader best of all, however.

Directed by Chris McKay from a script by, among other hands, Seth Grahame-Smith of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, it’s a highly observant spoof of the sort of turgid, self-important superhero epics that have, for me, taken a lot of the fun out of the genre. Batman, growled here, as in The Lego Movie, by Will Arnett, is a vain loner, obsessed with his “nine-pack” abs, and opposed to letting anyone help him with, or share the glory of, his exploits. Partly this is ego, but he also can’t bear the idea of personal attachments of any kind—he watches Jerry Maguire and cackles loudly at the line “You complete me.”

He even wounds the feelings of Lego Joker (Zach Galifianakis) by refusing to admit that, as enemies, the two of them share something special. In response the Clown Prince of Lego Crime hatches a magnum opus scheme against Lego Gotham City, involving not only the DC stable of villains but…

Well, I shouldn’t give away too much more. Suffice to say that Lego Robin (Michael Cera), Lego Batgirl (Rosario Dawson), Lego Superman (Channing Tatum) and Lego Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) all get involved in the story, among many other classic characters. The gags are obsessively detailed and fly by at furious speed, yet somehow, maybe because of the geometrical nature of the figures, the action remains more lucid and coherent than it is in many of the movies being sent up here.

Better still, unlike many of the targets of its parody, it clocks in at well under two hours.

ASCENT OF A WOMAN

Opening this weekend:

Jupiter Ascending—Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is an immigrant from Russia—she was actually born aboard a ship at sea, like Marina in Pericles—now stuck working as a housecleaning drudge in Chicago. Then alien goblins try to kill her, but she’s rescued by a hunky wolf guy (Channing Tatum) who, with the help of an old ally (Sean Bean) spirits her off to space.

There she learns that she’s somehow the heir of a galactic royal family and that, essentially, Earth belongs to her. There’s a creepy, whispering Prince (Eddie Redmayne), however, who wants our planet for nasty commericial purposes and thus wants Jupiter dead. Wild battles and chases ensue, as well as romantic yearning between Jupiter and Wolf Guy.

This sci-fi fairy-tale from The Wachowskis pillages freely out of sources ranging from Cinderella to Barbarella to Star Wars, from Flash Gordon to Brazil to The Wizard of Oz to The Graduate. The movie is long, and the exposition is so dense that I was lost at times. But I liked it anyway (so did The Kid, who remarked when it was over “It was too long, but I wouldn’t change anything,” a first-rate piece of paradoxical movie reviewing). I especially liked the look of it, a sort of Victorian whimsicality with spaceships like dragonflies or Alexander Calder mobiles, and haywire paper-pushing bureaucracies in the midst of space-age cities.

Kunis, whose hard-around-the-edges Eastern European beauty is softened by dark peepers big enough to have been painted by Margaret Keane, goes for as much bemused comedy as she can. I liked how she reacts to her new situation as galactic princess with something like irritability, as if she’d been stuck with a volunteer committee chairmanship when she was out of the room.

Seventh Son—For some reason, according to this movie, the seventh son of a seventh son is likely to show special aptitude for fighting monsters and other forces of darkness. Shaggy old Jeff Bridges is Gregory, one such warrior, referred to as a “Spook.” Having lost his apprentice of ten years, he purchases a new one, Tom (Ben Barnes), from the poor kid’s family, and quickly has him tangling with giants, shape-shifting bear-men, sabre-tooth cheetah women and witches who can change into harpy-like dragons with more ease than most women can change for dinner.

The leader of these nuisances is Julianne Moore, with whom old Gregory has a history—he sealed her in a pit for decades. She’s out now, and it’s fair to say she’s pissed.

This fantasy, based on a book by Joseph Delaney and set in a vague fairy-tale past only a little grungier and more convincing than the one in which Into the Woods took place, seems to be trying for the feel of a Harryhausen-style episodic adventure. To the extent that, for me, this is possible without the idiosyncratic charm of stop-motion animation, Seventh Son succeeds, at least intermittently. The story is boilerplate and the dialogue mostly insipid, and the younger actors don’t exactly bristle with sophistication and chemistry, although the ingénue, the Swedish Alicia Vikander, is quite beautiful.

But the monster scenes are strong, as are the veterans in the cast. Moore is an elegant, flirty menace as the Witch Queen Mother Malkin. Bridges continues to speak in that same pouty-lipped manner that he did in The Giver. Maybe it’s just how he talks now; in any case it makes him sound amusingly petulant.

The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water—The stakes are high in this second feature treatment of the adventures of Stephen Hillenburg’s insistently cheery denizen of the deep—it follows 2004’s The Spongebob Squarepants Movie. The top secret recipe for Krabby Patties vanishes, and it’s revealed that these burgers, which the title character spends his days happily flipping, aren’t just the livelihood of his avaricious boss Mr. Krabs, they’re also the glue that holds Spongebob’s hometown of Bikini Bottom together.

As soon as the town becomes aware of the Krabby Patty shortage, mob rule and apocalyptic violence commence almost immediately. To the extent that Bikini Bottom may be seen as an allegorical Anytown, this movie suggests, not for the first time in the cartoon’s history, a certain skepticism about how durable civility is in human affairs.

Spongebob and the diminutive, cyclopean villain Plankton must team up to recover the recipe, which is now in the hands of a manic pirate captain (Antonio Banderas in a live-action strand). Teaming up is tough on Plankton, to whom the concept of cooperation is so alien that he isn’t even sure how to pronounce the word “team.” The ensuing saga involves time travel, space travel, a dolphin with a clipped British accent and many other aspects.

Too many, perhaps. It’s possible that this sort of relentless, undiluted silliness works best for five to eight minutes at a stretch, and doesn’t sustain well at feature length. In any case, Sponge Out of Water comes off as, of all things, overambitious, and it drags a little. The Kid (who may, admittedly, be getting a bit too cool for this sort of thing) thought the film was too long, and that the climatic live action/CGI confrontation between Spongebob and his pals and Captain Banderas should have been arrived at sooner. I thought that it had plenty of laughs, but I’ll grant that shaving eight to ten minutes from the movie’s length wouldn’t do it any harm. The Sponge could stand to get out of the water a little more quickly.

TOME SWEET TOME

Opening today:

The Book of Life—Produced by the great Guillermo del Toro and directed and co-written by Jorge Gutierrez, this computer-animated feature is a tapestry of motifs from Mexican folklore, both pre- and post-Colombian, especially that culture’s version of Halloween, the defiantly festive Day of the Dead. It starts out in a town in the center of Mexico—which is identified at the beginning of the movie as the “Center of the Universe”—and involves a love triangle.

Said triangle’s points are the spirited, big-hearted town beauty, Maria (voiced as an adult by Zoe Saldana) and two local boys, Joaquin (Channing Tatum), a military hero whose fearlessness secretly stems from the talisman of invulnerability he wears, and Manolo (Diego Luna), who descends from a long line of matadors. Manolo has the chops for that profession except that he can’t bring himself to kill a bull.

The outcome of the affair becomes the object of a wager between two gods of the hereafter, and thus The Book of Life turns into a crazy cosmic epic, with characters turned into elegant skeletal versions of themselves as they journey into the underworld. Gutierrez manages the feat of making his story feel plausibly traditional while at the same time making it hinge on modern values like feminism and the abolition of animal cruelty. Also, the movie is full of lovely music, one visual splendor after another, and a really endearing little pig. It’s magnificent.

The Best of Me—Amanda, a sassy rich girl in a small Louisiana town in the early ‘90s, falls in love with Dawson, a hunk from the wrong side of the tracks. Dawson is no bad boy, however—even though he was raised by a violently abusive drug-dealing father (and apparently no mother) he’s somehow grown up into a gallant, studious, flawlessly well-behaved paragon.

But these two aren’t just star-crossed, they’re star-double-crossed. Separated by a tragedy as good-looking teenagers, played by Liana Liberato and Luke Bracey, they’re reunited about twenty years later, having grown into dissimilar but even better-looking adults—Michelle Monaghan and James Marsden, to be specific—only to see circumstances building up to a second tragedy.

This adaptation—seemingly rather loose—of a Nicholas Sparks weeper was directed by the always-interesting Michael Hoffman, of such underrated efforts as Soapdish, the 1999 Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Last Station. His work here shows him no less skillful. He modulates the performances and maintains a swift, dry tone that keeps the banal dialogue and contrived plot carpentry from spiraling into pure camp. Whether that’s to the benefit of the movie’s entertainment value is another question, but it’s impressive.

Marsden can sometimes use his great looks to comic effect; he doesn’t quite get to that here, but he’s still good company, and so is Monaghan. Sean Bridges and Gerald McRaney contribute solid work as Dawson’s scumbag father and curmudgeonly surrogate father, respectively. But the general sobriety and professionalism of their work can’t disguise what The Best of Me is—polished hokum. At best.

RIP to the beautiful, soulful, sexy, funny Elizabeth Pena, passed on way too young at 55, “after a brief illness.” She was at her sexiest and funniest in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and at her most lovable in the terrific John Sayles yarn Lone Star, in which she gets to speak the wonderfully commonsensical final line.

TV note: We’re in the thick of October, so TCM is serving more than its average quotient of monster flicks. This Saturday morning, for instance—check the schedule for local airtimes—we get 1967’s Hammer shocker The Mummy’s Shroud…
 

HOUSE HUNTED

It’s said that for a few years after the huge success of the original Die Hard, every action movie idea in Hollywood was pitched as “Die Hard in a…” That 1988 film featured bad guys taking over an L.A. office building until their schemes are bedeviled by coincidentally visiting New York cop Bruce Willis, so for a while it was Die Hard in a hockey rink (Sudden Death), Die Hard on a cruise ship (Speed 2: Cruise Control), Die Hard on a Navy ship (Under Siege), Die Hard on Alcatraz (The Rock) and so on. I once heard that this became so reflexive that somebody brought it full circle, and pitched “Die Hard in an office building.”

It’s odd that it’s taken so long to get to Die Hard at the White House, but Hollywood is making up for lost time. Just months after Olympus Has Fallen, we get another action extravaganza about an armed takeover of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down. The new film’s imitation of Die Hard is agreeably brazen. It even features an insufferably snide computer hacker, and Beethoven on the soundtrack (the Fifth Symphony here; in Die Hard it was the Ninth).

This time the attackers are an alliance of reactionaries and racists and militarist paranoiacs who despise the charismatic young black President (Jamie Foxx), who’s on the verge of pulling U.S. troops out of the Middle East. The coincidentally visiting cop this time is Channing Tatum, as a member of the Capitol Police at the White House to interview for a gig with the Secret Service. Also present is his politics-geek daughter (Joey King). The two of them manage to join a tour, and about that time D.C. blows up.

Literally. Director Emmerich, as is his wont, seems determined to outdo, in excess, previous actioners of this sort. In some movies, a fiery explosion in the Capitol dome might be the climax; here it’s the appetizer. Airplanes and helicopters plummet from the skies, motorcade vehicles chase each other across the White House lawn spewing bullets and rockets, a fire is set in the Lincoln Bedroom.

The good news is that we aren’t asked take a minute of it seriously. Aside from the fears and hatreds that motivate the attack, I wouldn’t suggest that there’s a single plausible element to this preposterous movie. The zombie epic World War Z, now in theaters, seems much more convincing. Yet somehow White House Down, unlike some of Emmerich’s other films, has a good-natured tone that makes its absurdity fun and infectious, even though, like so many action blockbusters, it’s probably at least twenty minutes overlong. I laughed and rolled my eyes at its corniness throughout, but I wasn’t bored or irritated.

Partly this is due to Emmerich’s over-the-top approach. But it’s also due to the actors, who either ham it up or keep straight faces as required—James Woods hams it up and Maggie Gyllenhaal keeps her face straight, for instance, as Secret Service officials. Jason Clarke is the most rabid of the gunmen, Michael Murphy and Richard Jenkins are in the line of succession, and Nicolas Wright is amusing as the tour guide.

At heart, though, White House Down is a buddy movie, dependent on the connection between the two stars. Fortunately, their personas blend well. Foxx seems sharp and canny, a quick study, while Tatum, proclaimed the Sexiest Man Alive last year by People magazine, seems sweetly dim as usual. The idea that the fate of the free world is in their hands is simultaneously scary, comforting and funny.