Olympus Has Fallen
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Cast: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Dylan McDermott, Rick Yune, and Morgan Freeman.
Rated R for strong violence and language throughout.
There's nothing new or original that Olympus Has Fallen has to offer. For some reason, every now and then Hollywood likes to produce two of the same movie within the same year. For example, Armageddon and Deep Impact. Last year there were two Snow White movies, Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman (though at least those two were vastly different from one another). This year we get two movies dealing with terrorist attacks on the White House. I will say that this film has the better title as opposed to White House Down with Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx coming out later this summer, but that won't necessarily mean better movie.
The plot involves a group of North Korean terrorists who are able to take over the White House and hold the President of the United States (Aaron Eckhart) hostage along with the majority of his Chief of Staff. Sounds similar to Air Force One at this point, but even though Eckhart plays a President who looks like he could take care of himself, he is no Harrison Ford. As the White House is under attack, Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is able to fight off some baddies on the front lawn of the White House before secretly hiding inside making himself a one man army to piss off Mr. Head Terrorist played by Rick Yune. That's when the movie becomes a carbon copy of the original Die Hard.
Overall, the movie is entertaining. Gerard Butler is a bonafide killing machine here and this is probably his best role since Law Abiding Citizen. You can't help but to root for him to take down the bad guys one by one leading him to a final showdown with the antagonist of the film. All of that is fun to watch, and action film fans will certainly appreciate those scenes. What this movie lacked that both Die Hard and Air Force One had was an awesome villain. Actor Rick Yune does fine as the main bad guy, but he is no Alan Rickman or Gary Oldman who both took their terrorist roles to elevated heights. Yune just plays a textbook villain. Kind of boring. The biggest problem I had with this action film is that the special effects of the initial attack on the White House were just awful. The explosions were so obviously CGI or Computer-Generated Images. We live in a movie world where virtually anything is possible to put on screen if you have the money, of course. That can make for some pretty awesome special effects that are found in big blockbusters like The Avengers, Avatar, or The Hobbit. What makes these movies have awesome effects? They have big budgets that allow them to have a great team of artists to oversee every detail. In Olympus, I believe director Antoine Fuqua had a grand vision of a big action sequence and just decided to have it all be CGI when I'm sure he did not have the budget for good CGI. It would have been more impressive if he tried to get creative with his shots with pratical real-life explosions, even if they were a little smaller. Instead he used CGI as a crutch. It comes across as lazy filmmaking.
To the average viewer, this may not be such an issue. I admit that I have seen one too many movies, but I admire filmmakers who can do wonders even with a smaller budget. Looper is the most recent movie that comes to mind of making its small budget look awesome. Looper had a production budget of $30 million dollars. Olympus had more than double that at $70 million, and yet there is a lot that looks fake in Olympus and almost nothing looks fake in Looper. Why is that? Creative filmmaking versus lazy filmmaking.
RATING: B-
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