Posted By Dave Howlett on March 25, 2013

The idea of the White House being overrun by a small army of hostile nationals is about as likely as…well, about as likely as two movies about a besieged Oval Office being released in the same year, really (Roland Emmerich’s White House Down, starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, is due in theaters this June). There isn’t a lot that’s especially plausible about Olympus Has Fallen, the first 2013 White House thriller to make it out of the gate. Not that plausibility is a prerequisite in the kind of high-concept action movie that was almost certainly pitched as “Die Hard In The White House”. But likable characters, coherent storytelling, and competent special effects are prerequisites for a successful high-concept action movie, which Olympus Has Fallen is most decidedly not.

Gerard Butler stars as Mike Banning, a disgraced Secret Service agent who’s banished to a desk job at the Treasury after tragedy strikes the First Family. But when a militia of North Korean agitators takes the White House by storm during a visit from the South Korean Prime Minister, Banning is naturally the only guy who’s enough of a badass to rescue the captive President (Aaron Eckhart) and his staff from the villainous Kang (Rick Yune), an agitator bent on re-igniting the decades-dormant Korean conflict and triggering a nuclear catastrophe, not necessarily in that order. While the remaining heads of state desperately try to negotiate with the invaders, Banning stealth-kills his way through the occupying army in the hopes of finding the President’s son (Finley Jacobsen) before his enemies do. Think Red Dawn crossed with In The Line Of Fire by way of Die Hard, and you’ve cracked the formula for Creighton Rothenberger & Katrin Benedikt’s script.

Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) directs Olympus Has Fallen as a somber, sobering rally of patriotism. It’s a movie of not-especially-subtle imagery; the attack takes place on July 5, while the streets of Washington are still littered with patriotic detritus from the previous day’s festivities, and there’s a shot of the conquering North Korean soldiers displacing the American flag from the White House roof that’s meant to invert the famous World War II photo of the taking of Iwo Jima (a racially insensitive allegory, as it seems to assumes all Asian nations are interchangeable). This is one drab, dreary movie, one that desensitizes its audience incredibly early on with the opening attack on the city–an assaulting plane strafes the streets of Washington with heavy-duty machine guns, killing and maiming countless people, and the ensuing ground assault is an endless parade of gruesome, blood-splattering headshots. The film desperately wants to capture Die Hard‘s claustrophobic thrills, but it lacks that movie’s sense of fun. What’s worse, it shamelessly cribs multiple plot points from its far superior predecessor (a taunting radio exchange between hero and villain, a doomed late-game insertion attempt from an outwitted cavalry, a chance meeting with an incognito bad guy), while sorely lacking in charismatic opponents. Butler’s Mike Banning is a sourpuss action robot lacking in John McClane’s everyman appeal, while Yune’s Kang is a smug, sketched-in zero without any of the wit or charisma of Hans Gruber. Morgan Freeman, as the House Speaker/de facto President, looks as though he’d rather be anywhere else, and the special effects during some of the splashier set pieces are laughably amateurish. This is the kind of movie that identifies characters with on-screen text telling us their name and position of authority, rather than revealing such details through dialogue (this incredibly lazy device isn’t employed until several minutes in, when a half-dozen major characters have already been introduced without it–a potential sign that the filmmakers didn’t have much faith in their own storytelling abilities). Tedious, ham-fisted, and the very model of bad taste (the seemingly endless scene where Kang beats and tortures the Secretary Of Defense, played by Oscar winner Melissa Leo, pushes the film into a much darker place), Olympus Has Fallen takes a popcorn-thriller premise and turns it into a grim, joyless exercise in exploitative patriotism. Oh well—maybe the makers of White House Down will get the formula right.

Related posts:

Categories: Movies, Reviews
Tags: Aaron Eckhart, action movies, Antoine Fuqua, Channing Tatum, Creighton Rothenberger, Die Hard, Finley Jacobsen, Gerard Butler, Hans Gruber, In The Line Of Fire, Iwo Jima, Jamie Foxx, John McClane, Katrin Benedikt, Melissa Leo, Morgan Freeman, North Korea, Olympus Has Fallen, Red Dawn, Rick Yune, Roland Emmerich, South Korea, The White House, Training Day, White House Down