Olympus Has Fallen From Grace

Is it possible to write a review of 'Olympus Has Fallen' without mentioning 'Die Hard'? Well, as a technical exercise I'm going to try. Then I'm going to review it entirely in the context of 'Die Hard'.

'Olympus Has Fallen' is a tediously nasty, derivative, racist, right wing piece of shit that exists only to shoot it's load over the military-industrial-complex machine and serve as a narrative of comfort for people who find current affairs a bit too troublesome. That in itself is not enough to make me dislike it. It's pretty much what I expected. It doesn't help that "GERRARRRRDDDD BUTTTTLLAHHH!!!" is Hollywood's most charisma free badass. It doesn't help that the violence is amped up to new levels of realism when cartoonish action is all that was required. It doesn't help that everything is leading up to a big metaphorical jingoistic ending but worse than that it actually concludes with a very literal pledge of alliegance.

What's so ultimately disappointing about this film is that there's nothing much to it. If you've seen even one movie like this before you know how the pieces are going to fit together. This film leaves you with the odd feeling that some of those pieces were missing and some more should have been added. Everything pans out in a simplistic fashion. There's no real twists, no character development, no straying from the template. It's just lazy tick box screenwriting that doesn't even follow through on some of its own set ups.

*spoilers*

There's a powerful opening where Butler's character Mike Banning, a Presidential bodyguard, makes a split second decision that enables him to save The President's life but as a consequence he's powerless to save the first lady from drowning. It sets up a powerful character relationship. Banning you guess will be haunted by remorse and will doubt himself when called upon to act later in the film. The President is now a single parent, who you now expect will grudgingly respect Banning but definitely have issues trusting him. The film does nothing with this set up dramatically. The President has total confidence in Banning; Banning is a bit mopey before the action starts. That's it.

The plot also makes it clear that finding the President's young son is essential to the bad guys' mission as it will give them a bargaining chip when trying to torture the launch code from the President. What happens? Nothing.  Banning helps the son escape before the bad guys have even seen him. Similarly, the chief villain makes it known that he knows who Banning's wife is and where she works. You expect a tense cat and mouse chase in the hospital or a race against time to save her or that the wife will be used as a hostage to make Banning back down at the final. Nothing happens. He phones her, they tell each other they're having a bad day; she goes back to work. Lazy, lazy stuff like this happens throughout.

Don't get me wrong , I love this sort of movie. I'm a sucker for the siege scenario and the whole rogue hero up against insurmountable odds thing. I'm more than willing to give these films a chance and overlook their flaws. I think there's a real art to constructing this type of film. But this one just left me feeling annoyed and disappointed.

Okay, so now let's get that 'Die Hard' thing out of the way. Olympus Has Fallen is "Die Hard in The White House". There's no getting away from it and nothing wrong with that. It's a premise so simple you wonder why it hasn't been done before, you can understand why two recent films have run with the same premise and you wonder how come this one manages to fuck it up so  badly.

Let's think about 'Die Hard' a minute. It's a classic that still stands up despite a quarter century of immitators. It still sets the standard by which other action films are measured and yet some people still don't appreciate just how good it is. It is like the Swiss watch of action film plotting. It's the sort of thing that looks easy until you have a go at it. The story is great, the action innovative, the characters are charismatic and the whole thing purrs like a formula one racing car. It's a fun and exciting ride.

If you're going to do a "Die Hard on a bus/plane/boat/" type film there's only a couple of things you really need to get right: try and contain the action to one claustrophobic setting, have a hero who just happens to be someone in the wrong place at the wrong time but who will do the right thing, an intelligent villain with a meticulous plan and....well, that's pretty much it. But it has to be said that even the 'Die Hard' franchise can't get these basics right and has now more or less abandoned the template. This is why the promise of 'Olympus Has Fallen' was so enticing an idea for the action fan. It suggests one location with lots of secret tunnels and ventialtion shafts to crawl through, a bold villain with his eye on the biggest prize, a task so Herculean that it can surely only be achieved through methods of diabolical cunning. What we get is some bunker scenes, some rubble in the oval office, an attack that basically involves storming the white house through force of numbers and a villain we know is monstrously evil because he takes his glasses off.

It's rubbish but it's still the film that 'Die Hard 3' or '4' should have been. Imagine John McClane being awarded a Congressional Medal of Honour in the Whitehouse just as all hell breaks out. That would have been good. Well, it would have been better than what we got for the dire 'Die Hard' sequels and it would have probably have been a whole lot more fun than this 'Die Hard kicks the Koreans out of The White House' nonsense.