Review: Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

Cast: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Country: USA
Genre: Action | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: Olympus Has Fallen opens wide in cinemas this Friday. If you’ve already seen the film we’d love to hear your thoughts on it, or if you’re looking forward to seeing it this weekend, please tell us in the comments section below or in our new Next Projection Forums.

Gerard Butler’s post-300 career has left a lot to be desired, both for audiences who responded favorably to Butler’s bearded visage and hyper-toned abs and, of course, Butler himself. Butler and, presumably, his handlers, decided he needed to move out of a potentially restrictive, constricting action-hero persona, riskily accepting a series of derivative, humor-free romantic comedies or underwritten, generic dramas. Hollywood, however, wasn’t ready to turn its back on Butler, at least not yet, giving him one more, possibly last, chance to prove he can open a film like movie stars can or, at minimum, improve his box-office cred with Olympus Has Fallen, an excessively gratuitous, ultra-violent, morally repellent Air Force One-Die Hard mash-up (the first of two identically premised action-thrillers; the latter, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down, opens in June).

 …Olympus Has Fallen, an excessively gratuitous, ultra-violent, morally repellent Air Force One-Die Hard mash-up…

Olympus Has Fallen centers on Mike Banning (Butler), a former best-of-the-best Special Forces operative-turned-Secret Service agent. Assigned as security for the current U.S. president, Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart), Banning has reached the pinnacle of working for the Secret Service work. He has a loving, supportive wife, Leah (Radha Mitchell), but not any kids. A tragic accident on Christmas Eve involving the president’s motorcade forces Banning out of the presidential detail and into a paper-pushing desk job at the Treasury Department. Not surprisingly, the consequences of the accident set up a predictable redemption-centered arc for Banning (through ultra-violence, of course). With the Treasury Department within walking distance of the White House, Banning witnesses a bold, daylight attack by North Korean terrorists led by Yeonsak Kang (Rick Yune, the Bond villain in Die Another Day‘s villain). Despite Banning’s intervention, the terrorists succeed in taking over the White House.

With the president, the vice-president, Charlie Rodriguez (Phil Austin), and the Secretary of Defense, Ruth McMillan (Melissa Leo), captured by the terrorists and held in the president’s fortified bunker, Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman), the Speaker of the House and third in line to the presidency, becomes acting president. While the Banning’s Special Forces and Secret Service training apparently gives him the near-superhuman ability to avoid hundreds, if not thousands of bullets, RPGs, and explosives, and take out the North Koreans one-by-one or in small, manageable groups proves to be exactly what the North Koreans and Kang and his commandos didn’t plan on. Banning works his way through the White House’s devastated corridors and rooms, clearing each location with the precision and ruthlessness of a video-game character, give or take a superficial bruise or contusion.

Given the financial investment involved, it’s surprising Fuqua and his producers decided against scaling down the violence to obtain a PG-13 rating, instead opting for a hard R-rating. As a result, each time Banning encounters a North Korean terrorist or four, brutal hand-to-hand combat, bloodletting, dismemberment, stabs to the chest or head, and head shots (a new world record, most likely) follow with mechanical certainty. Olympus Has Fallen. The bloodshed in Olympus Has Fallen almost always feels excessive and gratuitous. It’s unnecessary, over-the-top, violence for violence’s sake, jingoistic, xenophobic, a lurid revenge-fantasy heaped on one of the few remaining enemies capable of attacking the United States.

The bloodshed in Olympus Has Fallen almost always feels excessive and gratuitous. It’s unnecessary, over-the-top, violence for violence’s sake, jingoistic, xenophobic, a lurid revenge-fantasy heaped on one of the few remaining enemies capable of attacking the United States.

To make China (our largest trading partner), Iran, Russia, or one of the former republics of the Soviet Union responsible for the attack on the White House in Olympus Has Fallen would not only court disapproval from those respective countries, but negatively impact Olympus Has Fallen’s commercial prospects in those particular countries. Since North Korea remains (a) a repressive, communist dictatorship and (b) entirely closed off to the West economically, no one would object even mildly to the inclusion of North Korean villains in Olympus Has Fallen. The producers of last year’s poorly conceived (and executed), commercially underwhelming Red Dawn remake made a similar decision (although there, a switch from Chinese to North Korean villains occurred in post-production), but that doesn’t make the decision any less absurd or more removed from the real world.

Ultimately, the idea of a North Korean attack on the United States and, more specifically, the White House, is nothing less than ludicrous, an adolescent, right-wing fever dream, albeit an adolescent right-wing fever dream that Fuqua stages with unsurprising skill, especially when he’s not concerned with shooting plot-advancing, exposition-laden scenes. Those rushed scenes suggest that Fuqua fully understands the ridiculous nature of Olympus Has Fallen’s premise and the need to hide that ridiculousness from semi-discerning audiences as long as humanly possibly. Whenever Fuqua follows Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt’s script outside White House grounds, Olympus Has Fallen’s modest budget reveals itself. Exterior scenes that rely heavily on CG often fail miserably, but they’re, at most, secondary or tertiary to Butler’s ‘80s/’90s-inspired, retro-masculine action heroics amidst some of the most idiotic, offensive plotting and hyper-gratuitous cinematic violence in recent memory.