Olympus Has Fallen *** (2013, Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Melissa Leo) – Movie Review

My fellow people of the world, there’s bad news. Unfortunately, it seems that Olympus, that’s American Secret Service code for the White House, has fallen to pesky foreign terrorist invaders. They’ve flown in, shot up a lot of folk and broken in with a dastardly plan to implement.

And it’s the North Koreans again, the same international villains that threatened the Americans in Red Dawn and GI Joe: Retaliation in 2013. With the US President indoors, things don’t look so good, but surely someone must be on hand to save the day?

Oh, yes! Luckily there’s a maverick disgraced ex-presidential guard also trapped inside the White House just at the right time when we need him. And, with the US National Security team apparently helpless and hopeless, it’s up to him to save the day single handedly, rescue the President and stop the world being blown up. That kind of thing.

So, Olympus is down, maybe, but certainly not out. Olympus Has Fallen (2013) is more or less non-stop action and that is creditably well staged and exciting. And it also helps that the film’s pretty funny throughout, sometimes even intentionally! Some witty one-liners (‘Let’s play a game of “go **** yourself”’, ‘you go first’) fight for screen time with as many groan-worthy lines, usually of the brainless, gung-ho patriotic kind.

Character-wise, it is a problem that there’s only one decent role in it – Gerard Butler’s – and, though he is fine, more than fine, how much better Bruce Willis would have been 25 years ago? Well, of course that’s because, though the role has a different name attached to it – Mike Banning ­– it’s basically John McClane of Die Hard fame. But, with Willis too old to do it, the man from Paisley, Scotland, will do nicely, even if his American accent is little better than Sean Connery’s.

The other central roles for the US President, the Speaker/acting President, the Secretary of Defense and the Secret Service Director are surprisingly almost totally passive and cardboard, giving that distinguished ensemble of actors Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo and Angela Bassett quite a bit trouble. All four look pretty tired and fed up.

Worse still, Ashley Judd’s role as the First Lady is insultingly short. On the other hand, Rick Yune (terrorist mastermind Kang) and Dylan McDermott (traitorous American agent Forbes) overcome their rampant stereotypes and achieve a smart, stylish line in villainy, treading a fine line between Bond-style moustache twitching and being, er, vaguely credible, Jason Bourne-style.

This is a frustrating movie. Entertaining and fun, it’s certainly good enough, but it lacks finesse and has stacks of unrealised potential piling up in its empty corners. And it’s puzzling that such an obviously biggish budget movie as this is so variable visually. Sometimes it looks real good and convincing, with the budget all up there on screen, but at other times the CGI is rubbish, like some geek had done it in a drunken hurry on his home computer.

Do scripts really matter very much in this kind of movie? The story is absolutely unbelievable from start to finish and a couple of side plots, one involving the whereabouts of the President’s cloyingly sweet young son (Finley Jacobsen) and the other concerning the evil terrorists’ need for the three vital codes to the bombs seem pointless, even to the script-writers, and are eventually simply abandoned and forgotten about.

But so what? This is the kind of movie that’s all about its bold idea and the action. And director Antoine Fuqua earnestly keeps the faith with those.

So, now we can just sit back and wait for White House Down, out in September 2013.

Fuqua is the director of Tears of the Sun, Training Day and King Arthur.

Olympus Has Fallen (2013) was a surprise hit, grossing $98,925,640 in the US, and two sequels followed: London Has Fallen (2016) and Angel Has Fallen (2019).

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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