Olympus Has Fallen

Floro's Late to the Party Reviews - Olympus Has Fallen

This is another attempt to have Gerard Butler out manly-man everything in existence. In this version, Butler is here to out testosterone Aaron Eckhart as the President, and all of the apparently terrifying unknown that is Korea.

The movie opens with Butler and Eckhart boxing in the basement, and then *surprise!* Eckhart is the President, and Butler is his personal bodyguard in the Secret Service. In the first 180 seconds, we now know the following:

1) Eckhart can take a punch from a man with 2 inches and at least 40 pounds advantage, and not have a scratch to show for it

2) Butler is paid to protect the President. He seems to enjoy being bad at his job

3) They're super friends

Also, we meet the spunky First Kid, and the First Lady. Everyone is happy and nothing could possibly go wrong.

After things go predictably wrong, we skip ahead 18 months! Why? Who cares! Our Hero (Butler) has been reassigned to filing paperwork, and the President is about to solve the Korean dispute with his jawline.

"The only place that should have a dividing line is the cleft in my chin"

Also, Butler has a wife for absolutely no reason. Wait, I lied - she's there to have less screen time than the Speaker of the House Morgan Freeman. Yes, Morgan Freeman is not the President...yet?

You now know as much as this movie is going to tell you. Director Antoine Fuqua (most notably - Training Day, less notably - Shooter) typically likes to try and blur the line between good and evil, building it around 1 hero to show us a true paragon. One of the main conflicts he places in front of the audiences is "will the hero stay true in a gray and confusing world?". He also resolves said conflicts with "The world wasn't actually gray. These were the bad guys and they are now dead with bullets." I wonder if he just wanted a break from intrigue and plot sense build up, and just needed to blow things up with Olympus Has Fallen, because it sure felt that way.

The real action for this movie starts with an unidentified aircraft flying in to D.C. airspace, which then starts flying around and murdering everything and everyone. I mean all of them. With large caliber bullets. This leads to a terrorist attack that effectively murders everyone in a suit that isn't in the Oval Office on their way to the super secure bunker. Fortunately, our hero is too manly to worry about this, and he doesn't get anything more than grease paint on his face as he fights his way through a platoon of automatic weapons and RPGs.

Almost unbelievably, he does it without the beard.

Maybe I'm just too patriotic, but I had a hard time believing this would even remotely work. If I learned one thing from my 8th grade class trip to Washington D.C., it was that there is more than just 1 SAM battery monitoring this airspace for just this reason.

That and long bus rides are going to burn out your Discman's anti-skip function.

Once I got passed that, I again had a hard time believing anything else that went on. Without giving "everything" away, one of the ticking clock aspects of this movie is the top secret computer code to all of the nuclear weapons. Obviously, that's a bad thing for terrorists to have. Fate of the world level stuff going on here. And the only thing standing between the terrorists and the code is Eckhart, (Oscar winner)Melissa Leo, and a third person with his part of the code.

AND ECKHART KEEPS GIVING AWAY THEIR CODES! "Don't worry, they'll never get my code." is said a dozen times by Eckhart. These people are openly willing to die to protect this thing, and Eckhart keeps ordering them to give it up. And they listen! What's the point of having the ultimate code divided up to 3 individuals, if the other 2 are just going to give it up because one of them said so?

What if he was secretly Two-Face?

And that's when it hit me. Why am I asking questions for this movie? Gerard Butler is single-handedly dispensing vengeful murder to everything that is over the age of 12 and living. Isn't that what I paid for? Why does it matter that he can do anything he wants to the bad guys access, but the Pentagon can't? Why should I worry that he knows about the only air vent that wasn't sealed, even though they make a point to mention that all the air vents are closed? Why shouldn't he be able to place a headshot through everyone, even behind his back through a wall as he runs away?

If the First Kid is critical to get Eckhart to talk, why aren't they checking behind the walls instead of shooting through them? Did we really need (Oscar almost winner)Angela Bassett in this movie next to (Oscar winner)Morgan Freeman for what must have amounted to a long half day shoot? If the bad guys have what looks to be something hacking a code, why do they need anyone's code? Did anyone else notice that Butler went 1 for the 39 in protecting the President from bodily harm?

If we know about all of the access points that have ever existed to the White House bunker, shouldn't we be doing something about it? What would happen if the old admiral forgot a letter to the ultimate code? How many attempts do we get before we're locked out?  If the bad guys are in a bunker cut off from the rest of the world, how would they know their demands are being met?

There were at least another 80 questions I asked or wanted to ask, but I didn't. I stopped and told my brain to take a breather. Then I realized, I had fun with this movie. It's largely derivative from the best pieces of Action Movie Lore, and slapped together in ways that don't give your brain the option to make any sense of where you are, why this is happening, or what's going on aside from Gerard Butler's chest hair deciding the fate of the free world. Do yourself a favor. Don't ask any questions of this movie or the plot. The only answer you might get is a head shot or an F word thrown at you.