Spoilers below if you haven’t seen these but they’ve both been out a WHILE.

White House Down
PROS:

• Channing Tatum and Jaime Fox, two hot sassy leads.
• Jason Clarke amongst the villains.
• Buddy movie.
• Having the guy who becomes president in the emergency be the real bad guy = genius.
• Cool use of the building and the lawn.
• Has a little fun with it. Nice comic relief. Sometimes silly.
• The kid is more important to the actual plot AND is super smart and relevant herself.
• Better tension in the hero’s relationship.
• President gets to be more of a bad ass.

CONS:

• Not as believable that the armed forces couldn’t wipe ’em out. They weren’t in the bunker!
• Not as believable motivation on the bad guys’ parts.

Olympus Has Fallen
PROS:

• Slightly more believable in terms of the takeover.
• Slightly more believable in terms of who the terrorists were and why.
• Cool use of the building, especially the metal frames creating new inner walls.
• Great direction, the military scenes are all shot beautifully.

CONS:

• Way too sanctimonious of an ending.
• Loner movie. Seems too Bruce McClain wannabe in some ways.
• The US insider/terrorist is too low on the totem pole to really do that much damage.
• Takes itself a little too seriously, some of the torturing of officials was pretty gruesome.
• The kid is only important to the plot in an implied way, no real worry.
• Gerard Butler seems really out of shape for what his character is able to do.
• Minimal and dumb use of Naomi Watts.
• Would a secret service agent no longer on the president’s detail really still have the right fingerprint override for the security system and the right code for the safe with the SAT phone? Questionable.
• President too wimpy about watching others be tortured. Man up, dude.
• Beginning of the White House takeover is too drawn out, becomes nothing but a shoot em up movie for what seemed like 20 minutes.
• I thought a gun shot out a tire in the beginning accident but since that never comes back around to mean anything, was it supposed to just be a random bad weather accident?

Both movies
PROS:

• Underdog wins. Underdog tricks all others. Underdog is really Overdog!
• Scrappy outsider always does better than official protection details, whether they be secret service or military.

CONS:

• Moronic military commanders who repeatedly ignore the one guy with intel (the guy on the inside). If this ever happens, we’ll have to hope our military commanders have watched a few movies so they won’t make that mistake.

Conclusion
I preferred White House Down but Dad preferred Olympus Has Fallen.