Review of Olympus Has Fallen (2013) by Colton W — 30 Jul 2014

Evil North Korea invades the White House and takes the nice friendly president hostage. Luckily for The Free World though, Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), who works for the treasury department just around the corner, used to be in the Secret Service and he knows what to do. Despite being irrationally sacked by the president for being unable to save the life of his missus in a car crash caused by someone else a couple of years prior, Banning doesn't hesitate in leaving his paperwork unfiled and dashes off to help out, all guns and patriotism blazing.

The attack on the White House was clearly an invasion just waiting to happen though, because it's all gone to pot since Mike left. There's no sign of any organisation, discipline, or even actual ability to do the job, to be found in the current team of 'special' agents. Every one of them, whilst brave and heroic, is apparently really stupid or suicidal or both, as they all just throw themselves at the bad guys' bullets until they're all dead and Mike's the only one left to sort out the mess.

As you might expect, there's not much in the way of characterisation to be found here. Now, as this is an action movie, that's not necessarily a problem. What is a problem though, is the complete and utter absence of plot (and, come to that, any hint of logic or continuity). There's plenty of OTT action, bullets and explosions, and that's all quite good fun for a while, but it's pretty formulaic and doesn't take very long to get predictable and, frankly, boring.

'Olympus' tries ever so hard to be 'Die Hard in the White House' (their words...), and to be fair, as far as gun fights, noisy action and blowing up shit goes, it does go some way to filling the gap left by the, now somewhat neutered, Die Hard franchise. Unfortunately though, apart from a couple of (admittedly pretty funny) wise-cracks, Gerald Butler is not so much a John McClane 2.0 as a 14-day free trial Steven Seagal.

Oh well, if we're lucky, at least it might just stop him from making any more rom-coms - those really were acts of terrorism.