[Movie] OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN - 2013
This movie is ridiculous but in the best possible way...
Olympus Has Fallen follows Mike Banning, played by Gerard Butler, a former Secret Service agent who used to be one of the president's closest protectors... After a tragic incident involving the president's family, Banning is moved to a less important position... Then one random day, everything goes to hell...
A heavily armed terrorist group launches a massive attack on Washington, D.C., and somehow manages to get inside the White House...
The President is taken hostage, The White House is basically occupied, The entire security system has collapsed and Mike Banning is somewhere inside the building...
What I really enjoyed about this movie is how quickly it gets into the action... There's no unnecessary 40-minute introduction... The attack happens, and when it happens, it is brutal...
Helicopters. Guns. Explosions. People running everywhere. The White House getting attacked in broad daylight... The whole sequence is honestly one of the strongest parts of the movie and then Gerard Butler takes over...
Mike Banning is one of those action movie heros who apparently has a completely different relationship with bullets than normal human beings... Everyone else needs a tactical team, Mike needs a gun, a knife and five minutes....
Once he gets inside the White House, the movie basically becomes Die Hard in Washington.
Just One man, One building, lots of terrorists and I can't lie, it makes a lot of sense..
Butler is probably the biggest reason this movie is enjoyable... He gives Mike Banning this combination of toughness, confidence and desperation that makes the character easy to follow. He's not trying to be the smartest man in the room. He's just trying to survive, find the president and stop the terrorists and sometimes that's all I need from an action hero...
Aaron Eckhart also works well as President Benjamin Asher... I liked the relationship between him and Banning because there's genuine trust there...
Then you have Morgan Freeman...
This man can make sitting in a room and talking on a telephone look important... His character, Speaker Trumbull, becomes one of the important people trying to manage the crisis from outside while Banning handles things from inside but let's talk about the actual story... This is where I have to be honest.... The logic is hanging by a thread...
We're talking about the White House here.... One of the most heavily protected buildings in the world and somehow these terrorists manage to launch a massive coordinated attack, shoot their way through security and take the president hostage... Then Mike Banning starts moving around the building almost like he has the floor plan downloaded into his brain.
You just have to accept it.... The movie isn't really asking you to believe every single thing... It's asking you to enjoy the ride and the action is definitely the selling point...
The gunfights are violent, the hand-to-hand combat is brutal, and the movie doesn't really hold back..
I also liked the claustrophobic feeling once Banning gets inside the White House... He's alone, communications are limited, the president is surrounded by terrorists, and nobody knows exactly what is happening... That creates some genuine tension...
The movie also does a decent job giving Banning a personal reason to care about the president beyond simply doing his job... He feels responsible for the Asher family, especially because of what happened earlier.. So underneath all the shooting and explosions, there is a little emotional motivation driving him...
Now, Olympus Has Fallen definitely has problems...
The plot is extremely convenient...Some of the dialogue is cheesy... The villains aren't particularly complex and the movie sometimes goes so far with the violence and patriotic action-hero stuff that it becomes almost cartoonish...
For me, the biggest compliment I can give it is that even when I knew something was completely unrealistic, I was still sitting there in anticipation of the next action..
Rating: 85/100
Originally posted through scrobble.life/movies.