OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN

Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

Grade: B

Starring: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Angela Bassett, Morgan Freeman, Rick Yune, Melissa Leo, Finley Jacobsen, Robert Forster and Dylan McDermott

Premise: A disgraced Secret Service agent becomes America’s only hope when foreign terrorists attack the White House and take the president hostage.

RATED R for strong, brutal, bloody violence, strong language, and disturbing thematic material including gore, a scene of torture, and a beating

I’m finding Olympus Has Fallen a difficult movie to review, mainly because it reminded me strongly of two better films I would rather be watching. In short, Training Day director Antoine Fuqua’s new movie is the latest in a long line of films that couldn’t more obviously be taking their cue from the 1988 John McTiernan classic, Die Hard. Speed was Die Hard On A Bus, Under Siege was Die Hard On A Boat, the recent A Good Day to Die Hard was Die Hard Over the Hill—Olympus Has Fallen is Die Hard In The White House. Foreign terrorists nab some hostages, kill innocent security people, make ridiculous demands and threaten to kill everybody, while a fly-in-the-ointment wise guy sneaks onto the premises and slowly undoes their well-laid plan. Olympus also owes a debt to Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One, another president-in-jeopardy movie featuring an international baddie with love-of-home-country issues who likes to shoot important cabinet people through the head while other high-ranking government officials convene in a top-secret, tech-savvy room and talk repeatedly about how bad the situation is.

Both Die Hard and Air Force One are favorites of mine, and Olympus was almost painfully obviously a carbon copy of the former and made me want to re-watch the latter, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy Fuqua’s film. It’s a ball-busting, bone-cracking, unsophisticated shoot-first film that is enjoyable without resorting to the camp (or plastic surgery) of The Expendables and other recent 80s-action-star encore movies.

Plot

As the head of the Secret Service, Mike Banning (Scotsman Gerard Butler, gamely waging war with his native accent) had it all: an admirable position, a highly-trained team of good friends, and, of course, the trust and first-name friendship of the President of the United States, Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart), and his family (Ashley Judd and Finley Jacobsen). But when the presidential convoy hits the skids one night on an icy road, Mike is forced to make a terrible, unpopular choice. Fired from his position, he struggles slowly through a year and a half flying a desk at the Department of the Treasury while wracked with boredom and regret. He can see the White House through his window, can see the president escorted around by his old friends (Cole Hauser and Dylan McDermott, among others).

But, one ordinary day, the White House is assaulted by a marauding C130, garbage trucks equipped with .50 caliber machine guns, and a crowd of foreigners toting automatic weapons (all this immediately after the president welcomes a North Korean dignitary into the West Wing). Worse comes to worst, Secret Service members and other public service agents drop like flies under clouds of gunfire, and the president, VP and others end up in the president’s airtight, bombproof underground security bunker at the mercy of a seething Korean heavy (Rick Yune). The president and VP’s sticky situation puts Speaker of the House Alan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) into the Oval Office chair—figuratively speaking—and on the receiving end of the baddie’s demands (withdraw troops from the Korean DMZ, provide a helicopter for the transport of hostages, etc…). With time running out before the bad guy makes a lot of big things go boom, Mike sneaks into the desolated, damaged White House, arms himself, and makes use of his inside knowledge to sneak around, pick off unwary foreign sentries, and attempt to penetrate the bunker.

Rapid Reaction

Olympus is almost embarrassingly similar to Die Hard at points, from the fly-in-the-ointment scenario and a bad-guy-playing-good-guy to the bad guy and the hero finding ways to hurl insults at each other via intercom, walkie talkie, and video prompter. Oh, and the rendering of the Secret Service, Washington DC police force, and other uniformed Americans into bullet magnets harkens back to Air Force One. At one point, I silently did a head count: Butler is Bruce Willis/Harrison Ford, Rick Yune is Alan Rickman/Gary Oldman/Alexander Gudonov, Angela Basset and Morgan Freeman combine to be Reginald VelJohnson/Glenn Close, Robert Forster is Paul Gleason…am I forgetting anyone? \

But, it’s still not bad. Olympus is never boring, there’s a couple funny insults intended for American ears only (my personal favorite was one line from Butler to Yune: “I’m gonna kill you, take pictures of your corpse, and then sell it to the press, ‘cause I know you’re into that stuff”), and the violence is so heavy early on it’s sobering, and you want to see justice done. And it ends happily.  Oh, oops. Spoiler.

Acting

It’s a tiny bit funny that we have Scotsman Butler—once woefully miscast as the phantom of the opera—playing a true blue American hero, but the actor is believable enough in the straight scenes and he certainly has the build for a rugged, rock ‘em-sock ‘em action hero. Having graduated from playing Gotham City’s District Attorney to playing America’s President, Eckhart does what he can with an underwritten role as a guy who smiles and gives speeches for one third of the movie and is forced to sit around and sweat, handcuffed and at gunpoint, for the other two-thirds. Freeman could play the agitated politician in his sleep. Yune, who played headlining villains in the blockbusters The Fast and the Furious and Die Another Day ten years ago, is an intriguing bad-dude (naturally, he’s most interesting wielding knives and kung fu know-how in a mano-a-mano breakdown with Butler). Oscar-winner Melissa Leo has a few good moments as the tough old broad Secretary of Defense. Ultimately, it’s a star-studded group who manage interesting portrayals even with rather cookie-cutter types.

Directing

Well, as long as things blow up the right way and people look like they’re really dead when they’re supposed to be, how much “directing” is involved in a movie like this? The opening assault on the White House is--outside of an almost unbelievably lame sequence involving a collapsing Washington Monument--shocking and sobering in its intricate details. The movie does struggle with originality—anyone who’s seen Die Hard a couple times will find it impossible not to realize Olympus is very closely following the earlier film’s classic blueprint. However, Fuqua and his team do well with creating an air of menace, and even maybe making you wonder if something like this is really possible.

Content

Among movies I’ve reviewed, Olympus is automatically up there with Django Unchained, Lawless and The Expendables 2 for staggering body counts and maximum amounts of splattering blood. Some of these are in long shot, but there’s an uncomfortably vivid beating of a woman by Yune’s baddie, as well as multiple close up head shots (and I hope you understand what I mean by‘head shot’). The movie is stocked with plenty of four-letter words as well, but, of course, that’s not how it really earns its R rating.

Bottom Line (I Promise): This has been kind of a downer of a review, but Olympus Has Fallen is a great edge-of-your-seat popcorn movie for the action cravers and the strong-of-stomach. It’s pretty much wall-to-wall action, with an appealing cast and some eye-popping sequences. The audience seemed to enjoy it; I certainly did.

Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

Directed by Antoine Fuqua

Written by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt

Rated R

Length: 120 minutes

JACK THE GIANT-SLAYER

Jack the Giant-Slayer (2013)
Grade: B-
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, Ian McShane, Ewan Bremner, Eddie Marsan and Bill Nighy
Premise: When a down-on-his-luck farmboy opens a portal between his world and the mythical elevated world of the Giants, and a princess is suddenly taken captive, the young man journeys into dangerous territory to rescue her from the monsters.

Rated PG-13 for action violence and some gory images

I'm feeling a little let down by Jack the Giant-Slayer. Like 2010's Alice in Wonderland and last year's Mirror Mirror and Snow White & the Huntsman, it's supposed to be a broader-scale, more epic version of a beloved fairy tale, but it falls far short of the edginess suggested by that rather badass title. Squeaky-clean leading man Nicholas Hoult won't be mistaken by anybody as a hard-edged vigilante (this isn't Jack The Giant Punisher), and the familiar "Jack and the Beanstalk" fairy tale is here adapted in a tidier manner more akin to Mirror Mirror, or even 2010's Tangled, than the dark, gothic-horror-embellished pizzazz of The Huntsman. Mostly pretty conventional plot-wise, Jack does manage to gain some credibility with a third act crammed with eye-popping action. Ultimately, it's a mildly-diverting popcorn flick that will give girls plenty of time to oogle Flavor-of-the-Month hearthrob Hoult.

The basic story's pretty simple, and almost everyone knows its most basic plot points. Jack (Hoult, hyper-popular right now after the success of his zombie flick Warm Bodies) is a poor farmhand who eventually comes to the realization that he must sell his beloved horse to get by. On a trip into the kingdom of Cloister, he is able to sell the horse, though admittedly only to a monk who pays him with a handful of beans, which are supposedly "magical". By chance he encounters Cloister's lovely princess, Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson), a motherless, adventure-seeking girl dreading her impending marriage to the stuffy, power-mad nobleman Roderick (Stanley Tucci). While Jack and the princess discover they might actually have some things in common despite their different places in life, their lives are put on hold when the beans Jack was paid with erupt into an enormous beanstalk, which carries the princess high into the sky, beyond the clouds, to a kingdom of giants believed to exist only in myth. Immediately, Isabelle's father (Ian McShane) assembles a team to rescue his daughter, led by stalwart knight Elmont (Ewan McGregor). Taking Jack along, the team scales the beanstalk, encounters the giants, and finds the princess, but they soon discover that Roderick holds an ancient key to controlling the giants, and he has his sights set on Isabelle's father's throne. Soon Jack and Isabelle are trying to descend the beanstalk quickly enough to warn Cloister of Roderick's plot to pit the whole giant populace against it.

Jack hits the ground running, sending Jack into Cloister to sell his horse within the first ten minutes, after a brief prologue in which the young Jack and Isabelle are separately read the story of the giants' war with humans (they thought it was just a story). And it wastes little time from there, probably a result of Singer assuming people attending a movie called Jack the Giant-Slayer want to see some giant-slaying. Thus, the characterizations are basic, the sentiments few, and the budding romance between Jack and Isabelle has a cute moment or two but is actually rather shrugged off. This comes as no great detriment, though, as this movie, at 114 minutes, is a little too long as is, without any expansion.

If they wanted to cut something, though, they could always cut most of the Roderick subplot, which embarrasses the always-game Stanley Tucci with one of those frothing-at-the-mouth cartoonish villain roles. Even more embarrassed is Ewan Bremner as his goofy, jester-like sidekick. The rest of the cast (Hoult, Tomlinson, McGregor, McShane) thankfully get less ridiculous parts but are still a long way from three-dimensionality. Each of these characters is a cookie cutter type (the brave young hero, the damsel in distress, the noble knight, the grave king) who's fallen straight out of the pages of a children's book.

But the movie succeeds where it needs to. The scene where the beanstalk erupts out of the ground and through the floor of Jack's cottage is kind of awesome, and the last act--in which the computer-generated giants reach the ground and begin an assault on Cloister--hits a few notes that are flat-out spectacular. And while the obviously CGI giants are a little distracting, they're nonetheless acceptable as dangerous antagonists (and it's always worth hearing Bill Nighy's Irish brogue, even if it's from the maw of a grotesque, two-headed giant).

Largely family friendly but for a few intense action scenes, Jack the Giant-Slayer has the feel of one of those movies that entertains in the moment but will be quickly forgotten (I'm really interested to see the business it does at the box office this weekend). **I saw it in 3-D, which enhances a scene or two, but (as per the extra dimension's usual) is unnecessary.**  It's an uber-safe vehicle for Hoult (now that he's reached bonafide leading man status), and McShane, McGregor and Tucci are all deserving of better, but something tells me it could be a popular rental.

Bottom Line (I Promise): Jack the Giant-Slayer isn't quite the epic spectacle its tough title indicates, but some impressive visuals, engaging action, and a brisk plot make this a servicable popcorn flick.

Jack the Giant-Slayer (2013)
Directed by Bryan Singer
Written by Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dan Studney; based on the story by Darren Lemke and David Dobkin
Rated PG-13
Length: 114 minutes