Olympus Has Fallen
Starring: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman
Directed By: Antoine Fuqua
Reviewed by Danielle Muir
[rating: 1.5/5]
*This review contains spoilers*
Well, at least this time it wasn’t the Russians this time.
It is, in fact, the Koreans. Eerie timing, considering the whole nuke crisis. In fact, Olympus Has Fallen has nukes as well. Handled by Koreans. The head of which is a fanatical extremist hell-bent on bringing down America. It all sounds very familiar…
Not only does this draw parallels to the current Korean missile crisis, it also draws parallels to every single clichéd action movie known to man. Even down to Aaron Eckhart’s el’ presidente character screaming “Noooo!” as his wife plummets to her death. That isn’t a spoiler, Ashley Judd is only in it for five minutes at the beginning and…what caused the car to crash exactly? I suppose we’ll never know.
Not to get ahead of myself – the plot of this shiner revolves around Gerard Butler the actor playing a Gerard Butler the security guru, who gets demoted to the desk after saving the President but letting the wife plummet to her death. Oops. Hence the “no” moment. Also there’s a cute geeky kid with glasses screaming “Mum!” as well. By-the-book tragedy all round. Anyway, Butler’s going about his paperwork with a humph when he spies a plane tearing up the White House and its surrounding landmarks. Oh, and the President’s now been taken hostage in the bunker by said fanatical Korean whose not Kim Jong Il, and appears to know martial arts. Seriously. Now of course it’s up to bad-ass Butler to prove whether he is worthy of his stripes – can he protect the President and redeem himself when he could not do the same for the wife?
Yes. Of course the answers yes. Big fat spoiler. It doesn’t really matter; I’ve just saved you from a second act of gunfire and plot holes. For instance – how is it Connor (the son) is able to crawl out of the ventilation shaft when ‘all the ventilation has been sealed to the building?’. Why did we waste so much time mentioning the Korean’s were after him when it led to nothing? How it is even though the building is crawling with Korean soldiers, Butler has enough time to knock-out, tie-up and loudly torture a pair of unlucky soldiers? Why did the President tell his Secretary and General to give-up the codes knowing it can’t be unlocked without his third – even though he must have known they were running a scanning program to decipher it, making their job exponentially easier? How this script got past the drawing board we’ll never know.
It’s obvious the writer thought he’d come up with some zingers, for example “Let’s play a game of fuck off, you go first.” Or the cavalcade of other clichés. The truth is nothing is really memorable except the absolute bloodbath in the first quarter, which sees wave after wave of American agents mowed down by trigger happy Koreans.
In short, this is too clichéd to even be mindless, because your brain actively realizes how generic and ridiculous this film really is.
