“My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity.”
-- John Barth
-- John Barth
 Butler as Banning | Picking a better movie between Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down feels like picking whether I'd rather be blinded or deafened, but the winner almost certainly has to be the unremarkable White House Down. Both movies are gunning (pun mostly intended) for Die Hard in the White House, but Olympus Has Fallen falls so laughably short that I couldn't even recommend a viewing once it hits cable.  Gerard Butler interrupts his bench press regimen to star as Mike Banning, a Secret Service agent who was ingloriously removed from the Presidential Detail and reassigned to a desk job after he only managed to save the President and not his wife before their car fell off a bridge following an accident. However, in an elaborate terrorist takeover of the White House (I lost track of counting the impossibilities in the scenario), he manages to be in the right place at the right time to get inside and start messing up the terrorists' plans. |
Eckhart as Asher I expected better than this movie delivers given the quality of everyone involved. Besides the headliners of Butler, Morgan Freeman, and Aaron Eckhart, Ashley Judd and Dylan McDermott also turn up. We get a bit of a Pitch Black reunion with Radha Mitchell and Cole Hauser, and a Supernova reunion with Angela Bassett and Robert Forster also having roles. The Scottish Butler seems terribly miscast as he is only intermittently able to affect an American accent, and when he does, it is a strange, muted mix of Texas and New Jersey. Director Antoine Fuqua hasn't been able to rise above mediocrity since Training Day, and barely makes an effort to here.
The movie can't even follow its own rules. For instance, Rick Yune's terrorist leader Kang demands that no attempts be made to retake the building, knows that Banning is Secret Service, and yet never demands that Banning's superiors put a stop to his shenanigans. Everyone involved does their best to sell these points, but there's only so far a performance can elevate a terrible script.
The movie can't even follow its own rules. For instance, Rick Yune's terrorist leader Kang demands that no attempts be made to retake the building, knows that Banning is Secret Service, and yet never demands that Banning's superiors put a stop to his shenanigans. Everyone involved does their best to sell these points, but there's only so far a performance can elevate a terrible script.
Yune as Kang One by one, each character does something to lose your interest, to the point where the only reason you're cheering on Butler is in the hopes that he can end this cinematic disaster before the movie reaches its bloated runtime of 2 hours. Perhaps the worst thing to be taken away from this movie, however, is that it did well enough at the box office to greenlight a sequel, unsurprisingly titled London Has Fallen. Perhaps they'll let Butler use his Scottish accent as Buckingham Palace gets blown apart piecemeal.
A movie that fails on almost every level and should be avoided at all costs
RSS Feed