This year will see a showdown between two White House thrillers, with Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen hitting theaters in March, and Roland Emmerich’s White House Down on big screens at the end of June. The battle has officially begun, as we now have the first trailer for Olympus Has Fallen.
The story centers around former Presidential guard Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) who is stuck in the White House when the president (Aaron Eckhart) is captured by a terrorist organization and its leader (Rick Yune). In a recent interview, Yune described the film to me as “a mix between In The Line of Fire and Heat.” So between that description and the trailer, we can basically gather that this is Die Hard in the White House.
The fact that trailer hits the web in the same week that President Barack Obama was sworn in for his second term presses the impact of a story where the president is taken captive by terrorists. The images of the White House getting pelted by machine gun fire and blown apart by rockets should be pretty powerful in this day and age, where the fear of terrorism is as strong as it’s ever been.
Hopefully the film can turn things around for Butler who had a dreadful 2012. His film Chasing Mavericks grossed a mere $6 million off a $20 million budget, and the majority of moviegoers were in consensus that Playing For Keeps was even worse.
Oddly enough, when I first saw Eckhart in The Dark Knight I thought he’d be great playing a president someday. Obviously, someone else agreed, and in his brief time on screen in the trailer he seemed more than passable as the leader of the USA. That being said, I think Channing Tatum of White House Down may be better suited to be the next great American hero than the very Scottish Butler, so I guess we’ll have to wait until this summer to see which film does better.
Olympus Has Fallen will be in theaters on March 22. Will you be checking it out that day? Check out the trailer below and then share your thoughts in the comments section.
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