There will be two movies released this year about terrorists attacking the White House: in a few months you’ll be able to see how Roland “Independence Day” Emmerich handles the idea, in White House Down – until then there’s this, the portentously titled Olympus Has Fallen.
Directed by Antoine “Training Day” Fuqua and produced by its Scottish action star, Gerard “This is Sparta” Butler, after the relative flop of this year’s genuine “Die Hard” movie, Olympus Has Fallen is being pushed as the next big action flick.
Butler plays Secret Service agent Mike Banning, confined to a desk job for failing to prevent the US First Lady falling off a bridge – as we learn from a prologue with one of those car-on-the-edge teeter-totter scenes that happen so often in the movies.
When a ruthless troop of North Korean terrorists (Hollywood’s new go-to bad guys, as seen in Red Dawn) assault DC and take the President (Aaron Eckhart) and his aides hostage in the White House, Banning charges in to save, first: the president’s missing son, and then: the leaders of the free world.
Butler plays a gritty and humourless hero, prone to dashing superficial injuries and occasional one-liners: too obviously like Bruce Willis as John McClane, except with more hair and less charm.
As he infiltrates the White House, Banning is guided over the phone by a crisis group of political leaders, including Morgan Freeman as the Speaker of the House and Angela Basset as the Secret Service director.
Unfortunately, these capable actors are squandered by spending the whole movie in a darkened control centre, peering ominously into computer screens at the bloody results of Banning fighting his way in.
The usually likeable Aaron Eckhart as POTUS isn’t given room for much of a performance either: he’s chained to a railing most of the time.
On the one hand, Olympus Has Fallen is a po-faced rendition of “what it might be like if” foreign terrorists invaded the White House; and on the other hand it is stocked with action movie nonsense, like a bullet-proof hero taking down dozens of heavily-armed goons using only a handgun.
And any pretensions to realism in Olympus Has Fallen are critically undermined right at the beginning, by some of the nastiest special effects seen since George Lucas was a stoker.
The attack by an enemy warplane on the US capitol seems calculated to echo the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington – the White House in ruins, the Washington Monument crumbling like the Twin Towers – but it looks so fake that there’s little danger of being offended by it.
All that’s left is the director’s shameless appeal to popular iconography, which pretty well sums up the entire movie. Next!
Three stars
Director:
Antoine Fuqua
Stars:
Gerard Butler
Aaron Eckhardt
Morgan Freeman
Runs:
120 minutes