Disgraced former Presidential guard Mike Banning finds himself trapped inside the White House in the wake of a terrorist attack; using his inside knowledge, Banning works with national security to rescue the President from his kidnappers.
If you don’t enjoy retro thrills, you will have no use for Olympus Has Fallen, a movie which leans so heavily on the guilty 1980s pleasures of Die Hard and Under Siege that you almost want to buy it a dirty singlet.
A grippingly brutal first act and strong cast can’t stop this turning into a Steven Seagal film well before the end. And the on-screen clock, pointlessly providing the time before every single scene, may drive you mad.
Butler may not be Bruce Willis cool but he’s engaging and good humoured and convinces in the many fight scenes. Eckhart makes for a sympathetic President (his party affiliation never specified) while I’m sure that Yune’s fiendishly clever and barbaric villain would meet with the approval of Kim Jong-Un. Let’s just hope it remains fiction.
Yippee-kai-Nay, I'm afraid.
Some well-staged action early on saves its hide, but overall Olympus… scores a yippie-kay-nay.
What Olympus Has Fallen does succeed in doing, however, is delivering brain-off entertainment – and with it, a context in which Gerard Butler makes sense as a movie star.
A taught, tight disaster movie with nourishing political undertones.
In a movie such as Independence Day, the bad guys came from another planet, and that was fun, but Olympus Has Fallen is an unfortunate descent.
It would be easy to crinkle your nose at such a film; it’s derivative, it’s cheesy, it’s fantastically unconvincing, its patriotism unabashed, its politics reductive, its morals binary. Yet it’s also imbued with a strange, nostalgic seduction; a throwback actor in a throwback movie appealing to a throwback time when we accepted good guys and bad guys for what they always were; myths of a dominant culture.
The movie is preposterous, paranoid, solemn and – though not I think intentionally – something of a laughing matter.
General release. Check local listings for show times.