Olympus has Fallen

Olympus has Fallen was not at all what I expected, and that was part of why I had a grant old time with it. I expected a gritty terrorism movie that essentially sought to be like a historical re-enactment or documentary about what would happen if in a large-scale military operation, terrorists stormed the White House and took the President hostage. Instead, I got a very, very silly Die Hard-style all-American story of one man alone taking down the whole terrorist cell with his incredible infiltration skills while a cheesy baddy sneers, beats people up, plots to destroy the whole of the US and puts the plan into action with a 5-minute countdown in big red numbers on a screen. It’s so dumb and so dated, so sub-James Bond and so laden with awful one-liners, yet so sincere and unironic in its execution that I found it quite brilliant.

And that’s before all the infamous Tweets from American viewers who saw the film and left the cinemas ranting about Pearl Harbour, gooks and chinks. Oh, the great American public.

Stony-faced Gerard Butler fits his dumb role a little too well, and Morgan Freeman puts in a slightly less hammy performance than in Oblivion, but one gets the feeling he is there largely because his name is a box office draw, rather than because his role has any meat to it. Rick Yune continues his rather iffy but high-profile film work as the slimy North Korean terrorist Kang Yeonsak, and some guy who was in The Perks of Being a Wallflower plays a turncoat secret agent operative who gives himself away in what has to be the most clunky bit of writing in any Hollywood film I’ve seen in years, and indeed would have been face-smackingly over-obvious in a preschool cartoon.

After the initial highly-coordinated attack on the whitehouse, begun by a huge aircraft and finished by gattling guns in the backs of good vehicles, Butler’s character Mike Banning is literally the only good guy left alive who has not been made a hostage. He sneaks about the White House and shuts down the surveillance control in a very unlikely scenario, while the terrorists seem to come after him in groups of no more than four. Not only does he take them all down, he rescues the President’s cute-as-a-button young son, he struggles with the guilt from a melodramatic opening sequence, he orders about the top men in the pentagon and he takes down an advanced automated anti-aircraft gun on the roof.

Ultimately it all comes down to a manly manly fight of punches, knives and roundhouse kicks to the face, and you can hear the rings of ‘America! Fuck yeah!’ echoing somewhere in the distance.

Some will loathe all the dull-witted braggadocio, but I thought it was a riot. Loads of fun – and it’s even more amusing that a near-identical film, White House Down, will be coming out later in the year. Maybe that’ll be one to take slightly more seriously. But maybe not!