OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN
Cast:
Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Melissa Leo,
Robert Forster
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Running time: 130 mins
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Running time: 130 mins
With “Olympus Has Fallen,” it seems director Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day,” “Shooter”) and the 14 producers listed in the credits chose to use the $80 million budget to depict as entertainment almost endless, mindless brutality. It really is hard to believe that the director of what are usually stylish, smart films would allow scenes of automatic gunfire, death, and of a woman getting kicked around by a man, to go on and on with no relief nor human sense of mercy.
Fuqua’s biggest mistake may have been accepting this script. The plot is so bloated and predictable that any lead actor would have trouble working through it towards any sense of reality. Gerard Butler, as Secret Service Agent Mike Banning, plays the one guy in the White House who can save the day with the president (Aaron Eckhart) held captive. Butler’s performance lacks energy, and even his agent radio banter doesn’t ring quite true. It’s possible that he was overwhelmed by a script that goes from the White House attacks to South Koreans turning into North Koreans to nations on the brink of World War III to the U.S. possibly bombing itself into oblivion.
Regarding that last topic, there’s more than one credibility issue in this film. Presumably there is a code that can be used to self-destruct nuclear missiles after they’ve been launched, in case U.S. command decides it has made a mistake. The terrorists here very easily obtain the code, and activate it while the missiles are still in their silos, in order to make a “nuclear desert” out of America. Wouldn’t this system have a mechanism where, under no conditions, could a warhead detonate while still in its silo? Also, when North Korean extremists are found to have infiltrated the South Korean government, how is this explained? The script’s answer - “Nobody thought to look there” – direct from lazy-writer-central.
There are however a few glints of light in “Olympus Has Fallen.” Fuqua’s trademark lush aerial shots, this time of snowy rural areas outside of Washington, are effective mood-setters. Ashley Judd, as First Lady Margaret Asher, is radiant in a small role. Morgan Freeman plays a tough, wise, and slightly dishevelled Speaker of the House who gets into a memorable tangle with General Edward Clegg (played by Robert Forster). Some may be fooled, though, into thinking that the presence of these A-list actors exempts this from being a tired, predictable macho B-movie – they couldn’t be more wrong.
So what we have on offer here is a cheap, abysmal script with delusions of grandeur. Banning's signature maneouvre is jamming knives through people's faces, so there's plenty of that, as well. Unfortunately, without a certain level of excitement or intensity, the violence becomes very ugly. By the time, as I’d stated earlier, Yune's villain mercilessly beats a woman to a bloody mess, the film has effortlessly shifted from action to uncomfortable apathy.
Olympus Has Fallen has the structural beats needed for a Die Hard in the White House, but what it fails at is being an entertaining action flick, relying on too many derivations of familiar plot structures. So many single-location action films have come and gone, and the success rate is all over the place. Olympus Has Fallen, unfortunately, and it falls and falls and falls to the low end of that particular scale. The direction gives us nothing to focus on when the screenplay is playing it dumb, and the performers, try as they may, just don't seem to be enjoying it. A pedestrian performance from a middle-of-the-road lead actor, and direction that asks the (USA) audience to be offended when the American flag is shot through with holes (like the plot) while hundreds of fellow Americans already lie dead on the streets of Washington (at least the flag can be replaced) all adds up to a mediocre waste of screen time and money.
