Review: Olympus Has Fallen


Gerard Butler plays a disgraced former Presidential guard who failed to save the life of the First Lady (Hello and goodbye Ashley Judd), but finds a chance at redemption when he just so happens to be inside the White House when it comes under terrorist siege by dastardly North Koreans, led by dead-eyed Rick Yune. It’s up to him to stop Yune’s nefarious plans (involving codes for all the nukes), and rescue the President (Aaron Eckhart), the Secretary of Defence (Melissa Leo) and several other bigwigs currently held hostage in a convenient secret underground bunker! Meanwhile, Butler is in contact with the likes of Secret Service Head Angela Bassett, Speaker of the House Morgan Freeman, and military man Robert Forster from outside the White House. Dylan McDermott plays Butler’s Secret Service buddy who is the inside man. Radha Mitchell plays Butler’s main squeeze, a nurse.

 

As was the case in 1998 when two asteroid movies were released the same year, 2013 saw two action movies set in the White House involving terrorism. This one from Antoine Fuqua (The overrated “Training Day”, the stupid “King Arthur”, the eye-rollingly bad “Tears of the Sun”) came first, but I greatly preferred Roland Emmerich’s dumb but highly entertaining, old-school actioner “White House Down”. Not only did it have a more enjoyable cast, but if “White House Down” was “Die Hard”, this one’s that shitty season of “24” with Bauer being tortured by the Chinese. It’s just no fun at all, it’s the same damn movie done much worse (The Speaker gets sworn in as POTUS in both films for cryin’ out loud). Seeing the films in the space of just two days probably didn’t help, but this is inferior in pretty much every way. “White House Down” gave us Obama against an aggrieved father of a fallen soldier, whilst this one gives us a white dude and another white dude against martial-arts fighting North Koreans (!). And instead of Jimmy Woods, we get Dylan McDermott. Dylan McDermott ain’t no Jimmy Freakin’ Woods, and both his performance and the motivation of his character are dopey.

 

Cold-eyed Rick Yune has his moments as the chief villain, but those moments are too few. Gerard Butler is perfectly acceptable in the lead but can’t save a film on his own. An appalling waste of Melissa Leo, Angela Bassett, and the stunning Ashley Judd in particular. Morgan Freeman, meanwhile proves more predictable casting as the Speaker than did Richard Jenkins in “White House Down”.

 

Aside from a thunderous music score by Trevor Morris (“Immortals”), there’s not much reason to watch this film when it was done so much more entertainingly in “White House Down”, not to mention the several seasons of “24” that didn’t suck (Including “Live Another Day”, despite a return appearance by those pesky Chinese terrorists). This one’s just not much fun. The screenplay is by debutants Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, which is weird considering it’s essentially the same film as “White House Down”, which only took one writer.

 

Rating: C

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