Uncomfortably thrilling.
London Has Fallen
Grade: B-
Director: Babak Najafi (Easy Money II: Hard to Kill
Screenplay: Creighton Rothenberger (Olympus Has Fallen), et al.
Cast: Gerard Butler (300), Aaron Eckhart (Rabbit Hole)
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hr 39 min.
by John DeSando
I have two reasons I didn’t completely enjoy London Has Fallen: 1. The POTUS-under-siege motif has been so trivialized by repetition that even when the danger is played out in my favorite city, London, it’s the same old. 2. The preposterous strength and ingenuity of foreign terrorists have become so much of a reality after 9/11 that even Hollywood’s excess can’t blunt the ill ease I feel seeing the US vulnerable, even in a hyperbolic thriller. Maybe that’s the vicarious pleasure of this fiction: It’s close to reality, less fiction than ever.
In London Has Fallen, major world leaders convene in London for the prime minister’s funeral. Out of nowhere comes a coordinated attack that kills five, destroys major buildings such as Westminster Cathedral, while the president of the US (Aaron Eckhart) escapes solely because of the defensive skills of Secret Service hero, Mike Banning (Gerard Butler). After the rather interesting building destruction (CGI) and car chases, Banning takes the president to various “safe” places that are not so (of course, they have escaped from a downed helicopter with nary a scratch).
The usual tropes are present to comfort you that all is well in cliché land: Banning’s wife is suffering with his absence even more so now that the baby is due; the US powers assembled in one observation room under the sage guidance of the vice president (another sage performance by Morgan Freeman) are clueless and scared; someone on either side of the pond is a mole leading the mid-eastern bad boys to their targets. Yes, you’ve seen it all already.
Yet the black SUV’s, the earpieces, the scowls, and the swooping aerial shots are done as well as could be hoped for and exciting as ever. I never tire of the rolling martial drums, either, just so I know this is serious business protecting the US and its president. For films like the previous Olympus Has Fallen, scary action is part of their success.
But the years and ISIS blades behind necks on video are too real to make this thriller comfortable. Yet, who can be comfortable reading the news of our enemies 24/7 as they plot our demise. I just hope there are enough Mile Bannings to save us.
Enjoy this actioner for its own sake—entertaining American thrills. You won’t be able to escape, however, the reality of our own danger. No longer do movies give us vicarious violent pleasure—the enemy is not going away as we leave the theater—they are just getting better at what we see on the screen. Here’s what I wrote in 2013 about Olympus Has Fallen: “The black SUV’s, the sun glasses, the drum rolls, the foreign assassins, the wife at risk—these stock elements and more suggest we’ve been there before. Yet considering this is the dead zone time of year for the movies, you might enjoy some old-fashioned thrills.”
It’s still the same.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
