Cinema can be magic. Some films can change you as a person, make you weep with the joy of humanity, or connect your soul with deep emotion and memory. Some can make you laugh until your belly hurts, or cause you to wonder, and be moved with the rolling of the stars and the adventure of life we all take beneath them.
Then there are movies where the White House gets blown up and the world is saved by a guy who awkwardly jams F-words into sentences as though they were magazines into semi-automatic rifles... from inside the rubble of the Oval Office.
It’s 2013. Gerard Butler, a disillusioned secret service agent springs into action while a cadre of high-kicking, tech-prepped North Koreans kidnaps the President and takes over the White House. Olympus it seems, Has Fallen.
Gruber - sorry, I mean ‘Kang’ - takes off his eeevil glasses in the Nakatomi suite - sorry, I mean the ‘President’s bunker’ - as the music swells into an eeevil crescendo and the camera zooms in on his eeevil face. He’s a bad guy alright. I laughed out loud. It was like cinematography-by-numbers, with every beat clearly thumped out for children.
It’s not for children though. Bruce Willis, sorry, Gerard Butler, our lone gruff hero, is effing and jeffing his way through the West Wing and sticking knives into people’s heads. There are hokey explosions and gasps from TV reporters. There’s a situation room with a panicked table of politicians and grizzled army types who want to blow everything up. But there always is, isn’t there? There’s more...
There’s our hero’s wife who is an ace doctor in a nearby hospital. There’s a foolhardy attempt to... ‘send in the seals general, we’re going through the roof’ which Bruce, sorry Butler, warns them not to ‘effing’ do but they ‘effing’ do anyway. There’s a last minute nuclear countdown, there’s a helicopter fuelled and ready, there are defiant hostages and secret codes they’ll never ever give up (start your stopwatches) and there’s even a resourceful kid outsmarting the patrolling terrorists by hiding in the walls.
Even Morgan Freeman, demoted from playing God and Deep Impact President, and here just plain old ‘speaker of the house’, is looking perplexed in the situation room. He decides quite quickly I thought, to sacrifice millions of lives in order to save the actual President’s life in his role as acting Commander-in-Chief. I was amazed that nobody had told him about the continuity of command, especially given that he himself was sitting in the hot seat! The whole point is that the presidency goes on, surely? Perhaps he just really didn’t want the job.
And anyway, in movie-land, POTUS is some sort of deity that the USA will crumble without. But then, it is 2013 and they’re yet to discover what it’s like to have one who recommends drinking bleach.
The music slows, the sun glints over DC as the gunfire-shredded Stars and Stripes is lowered from the flag pole in sombre slow-mo. The North Koreans toss the flag carelessly from the roof as a French horn pipes dolefully from the score.
I guess in the end, I just found Olympus Has Fallen very boring. If you’ve seen 24, or you’ve seen Die Hard, if you’ve seen... any action movie actually, you’ve probably seen everything, every single thing this film has to offer. It even came out at the same time as White House Down: the same story, told in the next screen over at your local multiplex.
At one point, Butler smashes the bust of Abraham Lincoln over the head of a North Korean terrorist in the Oval Office. When I think about it, that absurd and unlikely sentence just about sums it up, I reckon. Olympus Has Fallen, sure. But good old Abe’ll never crack in the hands of Butler and Team America.
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