Directed by: Antoine Fuqua
Starring: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Rick Yune
Rated R, 120 minutes
Gerard Butler (left) and Aaron Eckhart star in “Oympus Has Fallen.” (Courtesy photo)
There are stupid action movies, and there are action movies that are so stupid they’re good (or at least fun). “Olympus Has Fallen” is somewhere in between, an uninspired play on the national security catastrophe plot line, but one whose depiction of violence and death is so breathless and unflinching that we can’t look away. Not that it makes the movie good, but it manages to stand out among its shyer peers.
In “Olympus Has Fallen,” Korean terrorists launch a sudden, massive attack on the White House without any provocation. President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart, “The Dark Knight”) is taken hostage along with many of his cabinet members, and the terrorists who storm the White House make quick work of the staff, killing almost all the guards in a matter of minutes.
The mastermind turns out to be a sneaky criminal named Kang (Rick Yune, “The Fast and the Furious”), a man who has infiltrated his own government in order to exact a bloody and overwhelming revenge on the United States for making a mess out of the Korean War. Kang is the sort of bad guy who takes great pleasure in toying with the lives of his hostages. Speaker of the House Allan Trumbull (the inimitable Morgan Freeman) steps in as the acting Commander-in-Chief, watching the action unfold from the Pentagon, but he and the generals advising him are helpless.
The situation would be hopeless if not for Mike Banning (Gerard Butler, “300”), a former Secret Service agent who fell into disrepute after the First Lady died under his watch in a car accident. Banning, no longer a White House employee, manages to sneak into the White House as the attackers invade, and from there he singlehandedly sets out to save the President, the President’s son, and to defeat all the attackers.
Much in the same way that Kang loves to play with his victims, director Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”) leans heavily on making the viewer anxiously anticipate the deaths of various characters. In fact, the only way the movie creates tension is by deliberately going for the sudden shock, the anticipatory lull followed by a deafening bullet. It is an effect that works, but which Fuqua uses ad nauseum.
Despite the distinct lack of innovation in this movie, which plods along with an utterly predictable script, it deserves praise for its cleanness. A movie that has little plot development besides adding to the body count can easily become a messy jumble of fights, explosions, and screams; “Olympus Has Fallen” may be full of fights, explosions, and screams, but it is hardly a messy jumble. The deaths are explicit, but not drawn out; the dialogue is obvious, but not inane (usually) and not superfluous; the camerawork is quick, but not confusing.
The acting is also refreshingly casual. Instead of the melodrama that makes action movies such a mockable genre, Fuqua holds back the performances here, especially those of Butler and Freeman, from being overly earnest. Some characters are overzealous by nature, like Eckhart’s President Asher, but this is to be expected in a catastrophe movie of such scale.
And yet, as much as “Olympus Has Fallen” is entertaining, its biggest success is that it isn’t bad. It is different from its peers by simply not being inept—and even that is arguable. For example, the bookends of the film are aggressively cheesy close-ups of the ol’ stars and stripes, and the closing inspirational speech feels like it was cranked out using a template for movie-ending speeches. The film is enjoyable as a series of action sequences, not as a story with characters or themes. Which is fine, since the movie isn’t made for consumption as high art, but rather for those among us with that modern American spirit that relishes voyeurism and violence.
I wonder, watching such an explicit, pull-no-punches approach to bloodshed on screen, if it’s enjoyable because it acts as a substitute for our own aggressiveness or if it could ever be an enabler. It’s up to us as viewers, I think, to decide if it’s worth it to open that can of worms over such a stupid movie. I don’t know if I mean that as an insult or a compliment.
Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
