Until last night I had never experienced an audience clapping at the end of a film in derision. Usually we’ll clap for the sheer love of what we saw but with White House Down, they clapped at the audacity of what it takes to make a pile such as this. At present, while I write this review for White House Down, the Tomatometer is at 50%. I feel that is about fifty points too high. I warn you now, this review contains spoilers. Just like the movie contains spoilers. It spoiled my dinner, spoiled my evening, and spoiled my desire to go back to the theater. Wondering, as I left, if director Roland Emmerich’s greatest gift to humankind was the desire to work at a soup kitchen and give back to the world instead of sitting through crap like this. It’s sad considering he managed to woo a long list of top stars.

I’m Uwe Boll and I approve of this message.

Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Woods, and one of my favorites, Richard Jenkins. These are not nobodies. These are award-winning actors. But then again, Uwe Boll is widely considered the worst director alive and he managed to get Oscar winner Ben Kingsley once. With too many more clunkers like White House Down, Roland Emmerich is risking becoming nothing more than Uwe Boll with a budget.

Here’s the plot. Channing Tatum, who has yet to survive a movie I like, plays Cale, a pretty crappy father that apparently only began showing affection to his daughter Emily five minutes before the movie began. On a tour of the White House with Emily, terrorists show up with guns, take it over, and Cale must stop them. He’s really just trying to save his daughter but if he can save the country as well, then bonus points for him. They are part of an increasingly complicated plot that might be about terrorism, but then is about money, but then is about nuclear war, but really is about peace. This might be the only document in human history, movie or otherwise, to claim the entire Middle East will sign a peace treaty at the same time if asked nicely. It’s not clear from the logic of the film if it’s because Jamie Foxx’s blandly unemotive, dull, insipid platitude spouting President of the United States asked them nicely or if it’s because the terrorists aimed every US nuclear missile at them. I’d hate to think that in a feel good family comedy where everybody gets shot in the head, they’d made an argument for nuclear armament.

This film doesn’t know what it is. Is it serious, is it comedy, is it family drama? Not that these things can’t coexist, but the PG-13 rating is higher than the 4th grade writing and nothing is integrated; it’s all just elements thrown together like Stone Soup or something. There’s a point in the film when some unnamed soldier looks at a screen that says “nuclear missiles armed” and announces, the nuclear missiles are armed. That’s great, because it works if you’re deaf and it works if you are blind. Oh, to be deaf and blind right now.

Wait… I am considering YouTube not being a blog.

The secret service is headed up by Walker (James Woods), who opens the movie patriotically staring at a photo of his son and announcing with a level of sadness that he’ll be working late. I’d watch him if I were you. Something seems fishy.

Joey King plays daughter Emily – a by-the-numbers social-network-savvy movie child. She has a YouTube channel and posts stuff like terrorists taking over the White House. But don’t call it a blog. It’s a YouTube channel. She also says brave daughterly things to the terrorists like “my Dad is gonna put you in jail.” Yeah girl. You get it!

[This next paragraph is a BIG spoiler. A big one.]

Richard Jenkins plays the Speaker of the House who’s tired and sad, and admits to the head of the joint chiefs of staff, the head of the secret service, and Cale himself, amidst national television cameras and the entire military, that he’s a villain and nobody has any evidence of it.  No evidence: not this confession right here that I’m saying right now, nothing. Wait… how did you get my pager!

[End of spoiler]

This movie has no purpose. Olympus Has Fallen, the other terrorists-taking-over-the-White-House movie of 2013, impressed me with how it goes back to the formula of Die Hard. Make compelling characters, put them in tough situations, and the drama, humor, and action will all come together nicely. In my review of Olympus, I credited how impressive the assault on the White House was. Not just from a big explosion perspective but from the view that I felt it might actually be possible and that was supremely scary. In White House Down, the terrorists basically just show up, with guns and bombs already in place and one by one shoot down the inept White House security. Ridiculously dumb. In fact, as I watched the plot get more convoluted I realized how little the White House has to do with the story but everything to do with marketing. Emmerich just needed famous stuff to blow up to sell tickets because the script is useless twaddle.

So how bad is the script? This is a film where the President of the United States gives himself up to save a little girl but is later willing to sacrifice the same girl because he can’t give in to the terrorists. The hypocrisy of it all.

Stand back… I’m going for the screen writer.

I’ll admit I was pleasantly shocked he was willing to sacrifice her for the greater good, but had he acted like a president in the first place, there wouldn’t have been a greater good to contend with. Attempts are made at creating levity and a emotional bond between Cale and The President, including an extended sequence of comedy with Cale and the president driving around the White House lawn being chased by mini-gun wielding SUVs. Not sure why the garage has so many vehicles with built in weaponry while the President’s car lacks it.

Ultimately this is just a blurry distraction of mediocre effects. Any attempt at the characters truly relating comes off as the promotional copy on the jacket of a book. There are points in the film where I felt sorry for the actors. Walker’s wife delivers lines, pleading with her husband, in front of the rest of the cast that felt embarrassing doing in public; everyone else staring at her trying desperately not to laugh. Did Hollywood lose a bet or something?

Which means the only reason to watch is the action of which there is plenty, but it isn’t well choreographed and it doesn’t look good. CGI helicopters unconvincingly animate down city streets. Cale repeatedly jumps over tables and chairs, consistently outrunning bullets. Emmerich is good at depicting colossal works of damage, but something like a simple gun fight confounds him. Subpar editing convinced me that Cale never actually beat the bullets, but what do I know? It’s only professional mercenaries shooting.

I know this is supposed to be a lighthearted action comedy that plays on big moral platitudes. I know it’s not supposed to be the smartest movie made and this is on purpose. I know I’m not supposed to take it seriously. I personally am not above such things and even enjoy that kind of thing when done right. But White House Down is not done right.

I just tell myself even some actual presidents were bad at it.

It wants desperately to be a family friendly Die Hard, without understanding why Die Hard works nor understanding that Die Hard isn’t family friendly. It’s as if they identified elements of that vastly superior film and went down them like a check list. Snarky dialogue from a reluctant hero? Check. Lots of action? Check. A complicated plot with twists on what’s really going on? Check. A head villain that acts as a main character? Check. A law enforcement officer on the outside who believes in our hero? Thanks Maggie Gyllenhaal! Even a lightly-used computer genius with a head full of himself. The computer genius gets his comeuppance in a way that I found so perplexingly dumbfounding I thought possibly I had dozed off and missed a scene. Is this the worst movie I’ve seen this year? No. In a twist of true irony, the only film I disliked more than White House Down is A Good Day to Die Hard. Go figure.

When the credits finally rolled, the people next to me burst out laughing. They all stared at each other having trouble forming sentences until finally someone said, “well at least our tickets were free.” The team behind this endeavor would have been better off donating the budget to saving whales. And this… coming from a man who OWNS Snakes on a Plane.