Olympus Has Fallen
Review by Anthony Morris
There’s a certain kind of dumb action movie that’s so dumb it’s hard to tell if it’s actually kind of smart.
Does Olympus Has Fallen show every single level of the US government and military as completely incompetent in every way just so our hero Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) looks good? Or is there some deeper message there about the state of US governance?
Wait, who cares, something just exploded. After failing to save the life of the wife of the President (Aaron Eckhart) during a car crash, Banning gets demoted from Secret Service bodyguard to hanging around the Treasury building looking cool and remembering the good old days when he used to box with his bro’, the Prez.
Then a Hercules transport plane flying towards Washington turns out to have all these guns on board and it flies around shooting up the place for ages (good work Air Force), forcing the President – who’s in a meeting with the South Korean Prime Minister – to hide out in the White House bunker.
Problem is, that’s only the first stage of what turns out to be a full-on attack on the White House by people the film really really wants to say are North Koreans but has to settle for being terrorists who just happen to commit all their acts on terror on behalf of the North Koreans.
Secret Service? Useless. Chain of Command? Useless (seriously, what’s the point of even having a Vice President if he’s going to be in the same place as the President?) and even when Morgan Freeman steps in to take over he’s pretty wimpy. Rest of the military?
Extremely potty-mouthed in the case of their top general (Robert Forster) but otherwise useless. Looks like it’s up to Mike Banning to sneak into the White House, rescue the President’s adorable son, kill loads of terrorists, take a deep breath, then kill even more terrorists.
It’s Die Hard in the White House only without any of the things that made the first Die Hard memorable, but taken on a dumb macho level this is about as fun as those dodgy men’s action paperbacks they had in the 70s where they knew to tick off a bunch of action beats (like traitors and ticking bomb clocks and clumsy fake-outs) without any solid reason why.
If you’re someone who thinks the US Seventh Fleet spends all its time just sailing around Korea so it can be recalled at a moments notice, you’ll enjoy this extremely silly movie just fine.
3 out of 5
Olympus Has Fallen
Australian release: 18th April, 2013
Cast: Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Dylan McDermott, Ashley Judd, Aaron Eckhart, Radha Mitchell
Director: Antoine Fuqua
