Angel Has Fallen

No Drone Unburned

Angel Has Fallen
2019 USA Directed by Ric Roman Waugh
UK cinema release print.
Well here we are again with Angel Has Fallen, which finds Gerard Butler reprising his role as ‘bodyguard to the president’ Mike Banning from the previous two installments Olympus Has Fallen (reviewed here) and London Has Fallen (reviewed here). Rejoining him for this movie in reprising a character from the last two is Morgan Freeman, this time promoted to President of the United States after Aaron Eckhart turned down a third shot in the role. In fact, Butler and Freeman seem to be the only two people reprising their roles in this one and even the brilliant Radha Mitchell, who played Banning’s wife in the last two, has been replaced with Piper Perabo here. I dunno, maybe all the others read a copy of the script before signing on for this one.

That isn’t to say the news is all bad here folks. Angel Has Fallen is an okayish kinda action movie but, it has to be said, it’s a pale shadow of the previous two films and I think they could have cooked up something a little better for the third one here, especially with the trajectory of the main character who is leading up to taking a desk job in his near future.

There are also a couple of really good actors new to the franchise jumping on here... namely everyone’s favourite bad guy Danny Huston playing... um... the bad guy and Nick Nolte playing Banning’s ‘estranged father who bonds with his son so he can save him at a certain point in the film’ before going in like the cavalry to aid Banning’s wife and child near the end of the story.

This one seems a little disconnected from the previous two films in the series because Banning’s obvious penchant for randomly stabbing bad guys in the head with a big knife seems to have gone dormant (admittedly, at least in the first movie, it was a necessary stealth tactic to kill people silently). So that viciousness to the character is less obvious and, honestly, that in itself is not a bad thing but, like I said, gives it a bit of a disconnect.

Another thing which lets it down, at least in terms of keeping some sort of stylistic continuity to the previous films, is that the action sequences don’t seem as brutal or over the top as the last two either. Especially in terms of the blaze of destruction as the bad guys wiped out most of London in the second movie. In this one, when a huge building is selected, almost arbitrarily, for complete destruction in the third act of the movie, you kind of get the feeling the studio heads are trying to pitch it back into that direction but, honestly, one building doesn’t cut it in the wake of that last film.

Okay... so one of the good points is that at least Banning has a little more depth to his, still fairly shallow, character. Being that he’s suffering from some kind of vague and unidentified illness which seems to be both something to do with his spinal column but somehow also something which causes almost narcoleptic episodes at unexpected moments. He is warned not to punish his body anymore and, while this character build up is nice, it’s also one of the reasons the credibility is shot to hell right from the start after we see him at both an outrageously realistically staged training session and, a little later, save the president, somehow, from an assassination attempt by a fleet of suicidal, exploding drones which kill everyone else but then, when both Banning and the president are found unconscious in the water afterwards, makes you wonder why the villains didn’t stay and finish the job. Also, I think Banning is in about three vehicular crashes in this one so... after the vague as mist diagnosis we heard earlier in the movie, things don’t really stay that credible for very long.

On the other hand, there are some nicely done things here too. After an interminable time which sets up Danny Huston’s character as a long standing friend and former war buddy of Banning... so you just know he’s going to be the villain straight away, as you’ll very quickly identify who his ‘partner in evil’ is going to turn out to be very early on in the film... Huston’s villain comes across as someone who has a lot of time and respect for Banning. Even in his inevitable death at the end, there is a certain dignity in the way his character is both portrayed by Huston and written by the writers that you don’t get in most of the movie villains on film (maybe Marvel's Thanos recently but, not that many).

The story, such as it is, is purely focused on Banning clearing his name after he’s framed for trying to kill the president (even while he is saving him) and also involves the FBI trying to figure out what the heck is going on. However, as great as Huston’s character is written, everyone else tends to be pretty thinly drawn and it must have been a real challenge to some of the actors here to add some flesh to their lines. For instance, Jada Pinkett Smith plays the top FBI agent in charge of tracking down Banning and she really has a good, powerful presence in the role actually. However, when she gets close to the truth of what’s really going on, she does something so dumb, with the expected consequences, that you have to wonder how she was even let into the FBI in the first place.

So, yeah... the action is nice, the score is appropriate and holds its own against the foley, for most of the time but, ultimately, Angel Has Fallen is not something I could see myself watching again (whereas I am tempted to go back and have a look at the first two again, at some point). It holds its own against some of the other action movies doing the rounds but it’s nowhere near as special as it might have been and just seems very dumbed down from its predecessors. So not much more to say... if you ike action movies then you may want to give this one some of your time. If not then... probably best to steer clear, I think.

Geostorm

Disaster Piece

Geostorm
2017 USA Directed by Dean Devlin
UK cinema release print.
Warning: What the heck... there are some partial spoilers in here.

Wow. Geostorm really is a load of old bobbins.

And I don’t mean bobbins you can re-watch every now and again because it has a certain, good natured quality to it and has a script that revels in it’s bobbinsy nature, winking slyly at the audience in a knowing way. This is the kind of, admittedly slightly entertaining but ultimately not all that interesting variety of bobbins infested movie-making which really isn’t going to stand the test of time and will forever be relegated to that time slot on Boxing Day TV, when everyone is too tired and attempting to digest the festive mixture of Turkey and Christmas Pudding in their gut to be too concerned with anything more taxing than this kind of thing on in the background. This, to me, seems to be Geostorm’s natural place in the world.

The movie features a cast who are all more than up to the meagre challenge this movie provides... okay, so some of the ‘floating around in space - let’s try to copy some of those Gravity moments’ stuff must have been challenging for the actors, to be fair. However, although they all take their roles very seriously and turn in some pretty believable performances... well, they absolutely have to be believable performances with a story and script like this. Geostorm is certainly ambitious, for sure, in a disaster created by ‘a bad guy’ scenario set in Earth’s near future kind of way... but it doesn't really live up to the execution of that ambition in any really enjoyable way.

The plot to Geostorm goes something like this...

In 2019, the Earth is/was ravaged by global storms that left us defenceless against an ever increasing planet that is trying to survive the fallout from global warning etc. Luckily, Jake, played by the always reliable Gerard Butler, has invented a costly weather neutralising system controlled by the International Space Station, effectively throwing a physical net around the earth with numerous ‘weird science’ ballistics that keep our weather calm and as it should be. However, three years after being fired by his little brother Max, the other leading action hero style male protagonist of the movie played by Jim Sturgess, Jake is recruited to go back into space and ‘fix’ the whole satellite net system, a project called Dutch Boy, due to some random weather disasters happening in various countries. However, it soon comes to light that this is not a small series of random cataclysmic malfunctions at all but a bid for global domination (if you take things to their logical conclusion) by the main villain of the piece, who you will spot at least an hour before the reveal, unless you’re somehow ambivalent to the less than subtle intricacies of Hollywood typecasting syndrome.

So it’s Jake in space kicking butt while Max and his secret service agent girlfriend are trying to stay alive on Earth, even though they have to kidnap the president of the United States to get authorisation for Jake to be able to flush a virus out of the system on Dutch Boy. And that’s your basic set up and... it’s all fairly breakneck in its pacing but terribly, terribly clichéd and, even with a semi-interesting car chase through an intensified lightning storm sequence, the movie never gets really great or, even, very good, truth be told. Butler and Sturgess are both fine and so are their supporting cast, including nice turns from Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara, Adepero Oduye, Ed Harris and Andy Garcia. However, this really doesn’t help with the script and although there are some nice effects shots, the eye candy nature of some of these always seems to be tempered with some spectacularly silly moments such as an ‘it’s okay, the dog’s alright after all’ shot which, frankly, the movie could do without, at least not quite as frequently as it does stuff like this here. It even has a long, protracted ‘goodbye’ scene for Butler as he sacrifices himself to save humanity... only for it not to mean anything five minutes later because... oh look, there was a ‘back door’ escape route off the self destructing space station after all. Ugh!

Also, there’s an immense amount of title dropping in this movie to keep reminding the audience, constantly, that there’s a lot at stake. If Geostorm is the new buzzword in the 'made up pseudo-science section' of the script department here then they certainly found a lot of ways to get it into the dialogue in as conspicuous a way as possible. People keep talking about the damned Geostorm all the time, in case we’ve forgotten where the movie is supposed to be heading. It’s not quite as bad as, most of the time, as “We’d better get a move on or that damned Geostorm wil be geostorming down on us before we can geometricise our geostormingly bad science!” Okay, so that’s not really an actual line of dialogue from this film but... it might just as well have been. Oh and, you know, since this movie is called Geostorm, as we’re being constantly reminded, it would have been nice to actually see the Geostorm happening, rather than have it averted at the eleventh hour to leave the audience wondering when they’re going to get to see the actual manifestation of the much repeated title taking place.

Throughout the running time, I never once felt like the writers were treating their target audience as anything other than super dumb and, really, that goes for the science too. I’m no expert in the scientific realm, not even close but, I can’t help but think that if they’d run a disclaimer on the end of the credits saying “No scientists were seriously harmed during the writing of this screenplay.” then the Scientist Humane Association would be up in arms. Not that there actually is a Scientist Humane Association but, who knows, after watching this thing then people living in the real world may just want to form one.

Okay so, as you can see, I didn’t get a huge amount out of Geostorm. Even cool composer Lorne Balfe’s score to the movie never really seems to give any real lift to the proceedings, which kinda disappointed me. That being said, I just listened to a few sample tracks from the forthcoming CD and they are actually pretty good away from the movie so I’m guessing the score was just mixed too low and the sound effects were burying it in a lot of places. Grabbing great scores to terrible movies is something of a hobby of mine so I may well put this one on my Christmas list.

And that’s really all I’m going to say on this one. Geostorm has some great talent which appears to be completely wasted in what seems to amount as... well... it’s definitely a kids movie, it seems to me. I can’t imagine actual adults out of their teens are going to take much of a liking to this but, like I said, I bet you’re going to be seeing a lot of this one airing on TV stations during public holidays in a few year’s time. Not something I can recommend, in all honesty and... well, it is a disaster movie, for sure but... not necessarily the kind of disaster the producers were hoping for, methinks.

Gods Of Egypt

‘Bigs’ by the ‘Bek’

Gods Of Egypt
2016 USA Directed by Alex Proyas
UK cinema release print.

Back in 1973, when I was five years old, my parents took me into London to see The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, starring John Philip Law, Tom Baker (before he had won his most famous role) and the ‘truly wonderful’ Caroline Munro. It was another in a small but growing list of films, containing magical beasts devised and animated by Ray Harryhausen, that I’d seen so far on television but this was the first time I’d seen one of Harryhausen's works at the cinema. So, in addition to the charms of Caroline Munro (I was even enchanted by her as a five year old), there was an absolutely jaw dropping scene where a large statue of the Goddess Kali came to life and fought Sinbad, swords in all six of her hands. It was absolutely fantastic to this young ‘un watching in wide eyed wonder as hero fought statue to the strains of Miklos Rozsa’s wonderful score. It wasn’t until a couple of decades later that I got to fight that statue myself in my sometimes guise as Lara Croft, when I took the controls of my old Playstation console in a level of one of the Tomb Raider games which was obviously inspired by the 1973 movie. It was still a great look back to that sense of wonder I had as a child.

So I have to ask, 43 years later.. where has all the thirst for magic and wonder gone that people can vastly ignore a movie like Gods Of Egypt in their droves. This movie is filled with exactly the kind of humour, spectacle and sense of fun that all those films that Harryhausen used to crank out would aspire to and, more often than not, succeed in delivering in spades. I must admit the promise of Gerard Butler in another mythical period piece kinda gave me pause for thought... just before the bad reviews, incredibly bad box office and delayed release date in this country (by almost four months) put me off going to see it. That being said, when I finally saw the trailer a few weeks ago, I realised that this film did at least have the potential to be a modern Harryhausen type fantasy and was helmed a director whose films I actually quite like, in the form of Alex Proyas who directed such great movies as Dark City, I Robot and Knowing. And then, of course, the final decider for me was that I heard some of the samples of Marco Beltrami’s score for the movie, which I promptly ordered on CD and, thanks to the old school style delayed release date, was able to listen to before seeing the film in the cinema.

So I went. And all I can say is, this film certainly doesn’t deserve the terrible reputation it seems to have garnered. I went to see this thing on the only IMAX screen in Enfield Town on a Sunday afternoon and, believe it or not, I was one of only five people in the audience. Such a big screening room to find itself unfilled. And a great shame too because, in terms of sheer 1970s style escapism, it’s a great little movie.

The film is filled with a load of actors, most of whom I had seen before but, also, nearly none of whom I could identify by name or in what movie I’d seen them. It starts of with an enthralling depiction of life in Ancient Egypt when the Gods walked the Earth with mortal men (an Earth which is depicted as flat at one point, which was a nice little touch). The Gods take the form of man only they’re much bigger... so if you think of the style of the reduction of the Hobbits in the Lord Of The Rings films, the mortal heroes are all quite little and the God heroes dwarf them in scale, to a certain extent. At will, however, the Gods can transform themselves into big, Egyptian beasts the likes of which you only see on hieroglyphics.

Gerard Butler is the main villain in this one, playing Set, who wrests the future king's crown for himself on the day of Horus’ scheduled coronation, killing his father and taking ownership of Egypt so he can rule with an iron fist. He rips Horus’ all seeing eyes out from him and Horus, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, fleas and hides where he hopes Horus can’t find him. Set takes Horus’ future queen Hathor, played wonderfully intoxicatingly by Elodie Yung, for himself and starts hunting down all the Gods so he can take their individual, speciality God-bits, and turn himself into some kind of super-God.

Yes, it’s all about 'the joy of Set' but, luckily for Horus, there’s a young thief called Bek, played by Brenton Thwaites, who is in love with a girl called Zaya, played by Courtney Eaton, who tells him how to get into Set’s treasury. So he breaks in, all Indiana Jones-like, avoiding various clever traps, and steals back one of Horus’ eyes. Alas, when he is en route with Zara to reunite it with Horus, Zara is killed and, after a fight scene where Bek and the blind Horus are arguing the stakes, Horus delivers her to Anubis who takes her on the first part of the journey to the afterlife. I won’t go into the whole thing here but Horus promises Bek that he can bring her back once he is made King of Egypt. So, reunited with his right eye and looking a lot, for most of the rest of the movie, like he just escaped from New York, Horus forms an unlikely and argumentative alliance with Bek as they go on a quest to meet various deities and arm themselves with the tools and wisdom to defeat Set. It’s a twisty turny road but, even though the plot is simplistic, it’s actually a little more layered than those old Harryhausen movies, giving it a little weight in places where it's not strictly necessary but it certainly doesn’t detract from the sense of fun in the movie... actually giving it the kind of depth modern cinema-goers might feel they need mixed in with their escapism these days.

I’ve always, for some reason, had a passion for Ancient Egyptian iconography. Never really studied their culture much but always loved going to the British Museum and hanging out with the mummies and definitely enjoyed movies or TV shows that plundered this culture for their settings. This film uses it and takes it to levels we’ve not seen before. The Gods themselves, who bleed gold and who, when they change into their big golden CGI counterparts, are a little like watching a Transformers movie, are very impressive and the film is all about the spectacle of these Gods. There are some cool compositions and landscapes to take in and I found myself really enjoying this movie as every new plot twist and beast was revealed throughout the course of the running time.

Some of the editing is interesting too. There’s a particular battle scene where Horus is battling five, um... I guess they’re ‘cow-gods’... where the shots don’t necessarily follow on from each other. Normally I'd find this confusing but in the case of this sequence, it’s like a visual shorthand for only showing the audience the key points of the battle and I was quite impressed by this fight, actually. It’s not exactly the splashiest of the sequences in the movie but the way in which the length and choice of each shot in this minor skirmish was put together to form a credible whole was something I was conscious enough to notice as it was happening... which makes for an interesting viewing experience.

The film is full of great action, impressive set design, wonderful costumes, great actors (who also include Geoffrey Rush as Ra and the new Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman, as Thoth, in their number), some interesting but surprisingly rewarding editing choices and a kick-ass score by the aforementioned Marco Beltrami. On the score front I think he maybe could have used a little more of the silver screen’s legacy of the pseudo-Egyptian tint that composers like Dimitri Tiomkin invented for Land Of The Pharaohs but, even so, it’s appropriate support for the picture and great as a stand alone listen too, if you’re of the mind.

My one small criticism of the movie was that I was left a little unimpressed by the visualisation of the personification of the Sphinx here. I think it could have been maybe a little more like the ruins of the one we now know and I do think that was the idea... I just didn't think it worked so well. However, it’s a very minor grumble and he still got a big smile from me when he utters the line “Oh, bother.” at one point.

All in all, this is a great movie for lovers of fantastic cinema. I said it when I first saw the movie The Big Liebowski and I’ll say it again for this movie too... this is exactly the kind of film that cinema was invented to show. Big, larger than life visions made celluloid flesh (alas, now poorer quality digital flesh) and projected onto a big screen. If you loved all those old movies like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or Jason And The Argonauts then Gods Of Egypt is the very successful, at least in my book, modernisation of these kinds of things. So don’t miss out just because of bad reviews and poor box office... this is a really great homage to those clashes of titans from yesteryear. So when you see those bad reviews... just tut and come in, anyway.

London Has Fallen

City Of Lon-Down

London Has Fallen
2016 UK/USA/Bulgaria
Directed by Babak Najafi
UK cinema release print.

Ha. Well here we go again... Gerard Butler’s stab-happy character Mike Banning is back in the line of fire, once more risking life and limb in the service of his president, reprised by Aaron Eckhart, in this fairly loud but never dull action thriller sequel to the previous film, Olympus Has Fallen (reviewed by me here). Now I quite liked the original movie and, of the two ‘Whitehouse under attack’ movies that came out that year, the other being White House Down (reviewed here), I thought that Olympus Has Fallen was the better of the two.

Now there were some warning signs that this sequel, London Has Fallen, might be in trouble as it seems to have seen off more than its fair share of directors in its long journey to the cinema, including the director of the original movie. That being said, I can’t say I felt in any way drastically let down by it and I was pretty excited to see my home town taking the brunt of the terrorist carnage this time around. London has been getting picked on for wide scale destruction a few times in the last five years or so by Hollywood movies... after a long drought which means my best memories of London under attack are still the British monster movie Gorgo, which I last saw when I was maybe eight years old. It’s just somewhat refreshing, after a long wilderness of not getting walloped, when you see famous places like London Bridge and Westminster Cathedral decimated (almost quite literally, in the actual sense of the word... no total destruction here) by the agents of evil and I have to confess that, despite reports that the movie is a bit shaky, I had a pretty good time with this one. It made absolutely no demands on my brain and, after a hard day at work, I kinda appreciated that.

Najafi’s direction of the movie is pretty assured in that the way the action sequences are shot and edited continue the trend in this franchise of being absolutely straightforward and easy to decode. If you like action films but find yourself at odds with the editing on some of these modern blockbusters where they’re often, I suspect, just trying to edit themselves out of not having enough shot coverage, then you have nothing to be concerned about on that count here... the choreography of the stunts and action isn’t in any way confusing.

The Mike Banning character does, however, retain that uncompromising, almost gleeful, ruthlessness in his violence but... well I guess that’s just something that gives the character a unique edge. You may not necessarily agree with the wild abandon into which he throws himself into killing off his enemies but that at least has a certain amount of continuity with Butler’s role in the first one so I don’t think you can complain too vocally about that. I’m guessing the Americans will see him as a passionate patriot but personally, for me, he’s very much an anti-hero in his pursuit of violent solutions and, whether you hide it in jingoistic flag waving and go with it or not, the character is not somebody I would necessarily want to hang out with in a pub. As a fictional character though... yeah, I’m not going to get too distracted by that... I’m happy to watch violent movies and just assume that anybody watching who is not already of that mindset themselves is not going to be in any way influenced by this. Butler does what he does and he does it well. The same for Eckhart... he’s a harder character, in some ways, than he was in the first film but he has a certain amount of honour to him and your sympathies tend to align with him, as best as they can with such broadly drawn characters.

The acting is top notch and the action is credible. There’s one action sequence toward the end of the movie where Banning and a group of British military are moving in on a terrorist complex which very much uses the vocabulary, to some extent, of those first and third person shooter styles of video games, almost dropping you right into the action with the characters and using the camera to stay with one or two of them and scope out all the angles of attack, as the good guys and bad guys clash. It's very effectively done here and, in some ways, it reminded me of the opening of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, although it obviously doesn’t have the same shock effect of that movie... nor is it supposed too. The action sequences are very well done and that’s half the battle in this kind of tale.

Actually, there’s a lot of stuff I liked here...

For instance the fact that it’s a sequel but not necessarily hitting the same kind of marks as the first movie. Olympus Has Fallen was very much a ‘stealth’ action movie set, more or less, inside one location and it had the feel of, say, the first Die Hard movie in that respect. Here, the canvass has opened out and after a trap is set using the death of the British Prime minister, we have a movie which takes place all around our fair capital and involves not just hand to hand combat but also car chases and helicopter action. This movie is not just trying to be an imitation of the first one and I really appreciate this. That being said, fans of Butler’s stab happy, head busting in the first one (where it made more sense for that stuff to be happening) is referenced in at least one action scene here. Oh yes, the happy head stabber that is Mike Banning returns to blade up more skulls in his thirst for cranial destruction. Not nearly as much as the first movie but it’s there for the fans. What fans, I don’t know? Fans of being stabbed in the head, I guess.

Anyway, I digress. Another great thing about this movie is that the writers are not afraid to kill off regular characters from the first movie. Once again, actors and actresses such as Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster and Rhada Mitchell are back and, all I’ll say is that at least one of them doesn’t survive the picture.You’ll probably guess who before things happen, though. One thing I will say is that, just like the first movie, Rhada Mitchell is almost criminally underused as Mike Banning’s understanding wife. She’s such a great actress and I think she would have been equally good at playing Gerard Butler’s role in some ways and I just hope that her role is expanded a little more if there’s a third film in the franchise (and never mind Pitch Black or the Silent Hill movies... if you want to see Rahda Mitchell being absolutely amazing, check out a little movie called High Art sometime).

A stand out moment for me, in the film, was when a car with heavy, bullet proof glass kept on going and going until, after the pummeling it’s taken, some of the bullets finally start to go through the glass and the driver is killed. This is great. You hardly ever see bullet proof glass failing in the movies. They’re usually impervious to the passage of time and wear but here... yeah, I quite liked that touch which I can only presume is the reality of the situation. Keep hitting a re-enforced windshield with a gazillion bullets and, eventually, some of them will get through. So well done whoever came up with that one.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about London Has Fallen. Good all round action which tends to simplify the political and moral issues of its plot but which kinda has its heart in the right place... albeit by showing a somewhat vengeful side of America. Trevor Morris’ score is solid and appropriate, once again and the good news is that at least this time around it’s been issued on CD... the first score is only available on download so, as I said in my review of the last one, no CD... no purchase. My only real grumble is that the talented British medical profession were only able to determine that the Prime Minister was killed rather than died naturally on the same day they were burying him... that makes no sense and is a detail kinda glossed over to serve the story (or blow a hole in it). Other than that though.... London Has Fallen is a thrilling time at the movies. It’s not one I’d rush out to see again but it is a competent and satisfying time at the cinema... so if you like that kind of thing, maybe go see it.

Olympus Has Fallen

Stabracadabra!

Olympus Has Fallen
USA 2013
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers lurking stealthily to jump out and stab you up!

In his new film Die Hard, Bruce Willis plays an action hero who is trapped in a building with a group of terrorists... woah.

Wait, wait. Okay... sorry folks. For a minute there I got my movies mixed up. Let me start this review again.

In his new film Olympus Has Fallen, Gerard Butler plays an action hero who is trapped in a building with a group of terrorists.

Yep, that’s nailed it good.

For anybody still in any doubt... yes, Olympus Has Fallen bears a similar structure and stimulates the exact same thrills that the original Die Hard movie did. The simplistic plots to both are uncannily alike and when I tweeted less than an hour before going to see this new one that I was just going off to see Die Hard 6: Today Is A Good Day For Olympus To Fall, I really wasn’t expecting the similarities to be so blatant and while I think the original Die Hard has a lot of edge over Olympus Has Fallen, in both its witty visual and musical language and, also, its good humour, the slightly more straightforward Olympus Has Fallen is also quite entertaining and is actually quite competently made.

That being said, the film doesn’t quite satisfy enough at the end.

Similarly, a film I liked years ago by the same director, The Replacement Killers, also suffers from the same lack of over the top panache in the “end game” stakes but then again, that might not be what the director was aiming for with this one. And while it’s far from a perfect action movie, it’s certainly very well crafted... not particularly in composition terms but certainly in the editing. It’s not the jumpy MTV generation style of visual jiggery pokery you might be expecting from an action fest of this magnitude and there are some nice, fluid and longer shots amidst the “dazed and confused” style of editing going on in some of the more insanely loud sequences in the movie. And at least the shots all seem to match up to each other.

What I’m trying to say here, I guess, is that the action sequences, of which there are many, won’t leave you confused and wondering about what’s just happened... it’s all very well put together and easy to understand. They’ve started getting a little better at this kind of stuff again just lately in Hollywood it seems, as opposed to five or so years ago when you couldn’t follow hardly anything in these types of action jamborees.

Olympus Has Fallen is a phrase used for when The White House has been “taken” and it’s certainly been taken in no uncertain terms in this movie (a group of terrorists with a particular set of skills, no doubt). Aaron Eckhart, an actor I rate quite highly in modern Hollywood, does an excellent job of playing a president who is taken hostage with his staff in his own bunker in The White House and Gerard Butler, who is not such a slouch himself, plays the action hero with a tragic link to the president’s recent past life and is the “man of the match” and “on the scene” when it comes down to being the only “weapon” that stands between the nuclear destruction of the USA and North Korean terrorists. Although one of the ways he does this, and there seems to be an abundance of this kind of action in this particular movie, is to run around stabbing terrorists in the head.

I’m not kidding. That seems to be almost a mini theme of this movie. Stabbing people in the head. I’m not sure you can even do that all that efficiently, can you? I understand a high speed bullet will go through a person’s skull but surely a blade weapon which isn’t launched at “deadly miles per hour” is just going to glance of the skull of a person, isn’t it?

Apparently not, it would seem, and the person who knows this the best is Gerard Butler... who will basically stab anything in the head that moves in this film. Now, yes, I know he’s got to be all stealthy and not fire off any shots lest the terrorists know he’s there and “shhhh... be wery, wery quiet, I’m hunting rabbit”... and all that but, seriously, there’s more head penetration action in this flick than Deep Throat. What can it all mean? A disturbing trend setter perhaps.

Anyway, Gerard is obviously the man for the job and we watch as he runs about the floors of The White House, getting a couple of people to safety and figuring out how to get into the bunker before atomic death reaches Washington in fairly more realistic way than Martian death rays or giant reptiles. He’s ably supported by a brilliant cast, too, including the aforementioned Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster and the much wasted Rhada MIichell as “the wife of the action hero”, who is there to provide the odd poignant moment while Mr. Butler’s character takes a shot (in the head) at redemption to make up for the time six months prior to these events when he fumbled saving the life of the President’s wife.

And that’s what this movie is about. Redemption!

Well, okay, redemption and, you know, stabbing people in the head really a lot. It’s about that too.

I have to say that the character set ups in this one, dead Presidential wife, teaching the President’s son all the nooks and crannys of The White House etc are really kinda obvious, but at least what’s on the written page is executed extremely well and this extends to Trevor Morris’ excellent score which is appropriately flag waving and percussive and matches the on-screen fireworks pretty well... although it does get buried under the sound effects quite a lot, I'm afraid. I’d like to hear this as a stand alone score away from the film but, sadly, so far it’s only available as a download and not on a proper CD... so I probably won’t get the opportunity. Still, if we’re lucky, somebody might release it at some point.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about Olympus Has Fallen. If you like the Die Hard kinds of action movies and you want to see one that succeeds in all the areas a movie like that needs to succeed in and which presses all the right buttons, then this movie is it and you won’t regret giving it some of your time. That being said, it’s not something I’d probably look at again as opposed to the Bruce Willis films, which I probably will give a spin every ten years or so. But, again, having said that... I’d be fine with queuing up for a sequel and seeing how that goes. If explosions and bloody mayhem and err... head stabbing... are your thing, held up by some solid acting from all the principle cast (and the various people being stabbed in the head), then you should probably get down to your cinema to see this one while you can.