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