You’re supposed to make the publicity still after you add the green screen effects. (FilmDistrict)
By DCist contributor Matt Cohen
If jingoism were a drug, we should all be very concerned about the cast and crew of Olympus Has Fallen. The first of two “Die Hard in the White House” films to be released this year (the other being Roland Emmerich’s White House Down), Olympus Has Fallen assembles a remarkably random cast of action stars, highly revered award winners, choice character actors, and—for some reason—Dylan McDermott—to get trapped in the White House by North Korean terrorists and get their asses beaten to a bloody pulp for nearly two hours. The one exception, of course, being Gerard Butler, who plays the thinly veiled John McClane-type that stealthily sneaks around the overtaken White House to off said North Korean terrorists, one groan-worthy quip at a time.
The film kicks off with an excessively overblown prologue to set the stage for the awkward character arcs that define the film: Butler, playing the head of the Secret Service detail and sparring buddy to President Aaron Eckhart in the official Camp David boxing ring (Does such a thing exists? We may never know) before retreating to dress for a fundraising dinner. As a motorcade leads the president and first lady and future Senate candidate Ashley Judd to the dinner in the midst of a snowstorm, a bad accident leaves their limo dangling on the edge of a bridge. Butler acts fast and saves the president, but can’t save his wife. Cut to 18 months later and Butler has been reassigned to a bland paper-pushing job at the in the Secret Service’s financial crimes division and still blames himself for Ashley Judd’s death, obviously.
Of course, when duty calls in the form of an unidentified cargo plane entering restricted airspace, destroying two jet fighters, and then raining thousands of bullets on unsuspecting pedestrians on the National Mall, Butler is quick to answer. He springs to action and heads down Pennsylvania Avenue right as the White House is besieged. Meanwhile, the president and key members of his cabinet have been taken hostage in a bunker after several of the North Korean terrorists-disguised-as-South Korean-diplomats successfully infiltrated the White House before the main assault. As the White House finally falls to North Korean terrorists, Butler manages to slip inside undetected, thus setting up the Die Hard-y part of the movie.
The film, which comes from Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, is an early Razzie contender for Worst Screenplay. From the hackneyed notion of a broken man who must rise above and beyond the call of duty to achieve personal salvation (and a lazily tacked-on troubled marriage subplot for extra McClane-ness), to the absurd circumstances for which North Korean terrorists can infiltrate the White House, Olympus Has Fallen hits as many action movie clichés as possible. A remarkable feat, considering its less than two-hour runtime.
Fuqua, whose gritty realism and stark style was highly praised in Training Day, directs against a Washington D.C. setting that looks like it was composed entirely in SimCity. The film’s beefy first assault, which culminates in the Korean cargo plane slicing off a chunk of the Washington Monument before crash on the White House lawn, plays like a haphazard videogame intro in a first-person shooter; supplying enough smoke and bombed-out set pieces for Butler’s character to make his way from level to level before the showdown with the final boss.
Butler, who has firmly established himself as one of Hollywood’s most insouciant action stars delivers an expectedly serviceable performance. He does what the script requires him to do and nothing more. Fortunately for Butler, the script spares him from some of the more trying performances (like poor Melissa Leo and Aaron Eckhart who spend most of the film either chained up or being beaten to bloody pulps), as well as some of the more utterly preposterous and instantly quotable lines (such as Speaker of the House Morgan Freeman, who’s unfortunately tasked with delivering this choice line: “They’ve just opened the gates of Hell!”).
Still, as Butler traipses from room to room in the White House, taking out terrorists in the most gratuitous ways conceivable, we’re left slack-jawed, pondering: Can this film get any more absurd? And then Butler quickly answers by bludgeoning a terrorist to death with a bust of Abraham Lincoln.
With a film like this, it’s expected that a strong sense of patriotism emanates from the screen: The White House gets invaded by terrorists, a lone man kills all of the terrorists and single-handedly saves the day. America, fuck yeah! Right?
Wrong.
Unfortunately, Fuqua deems it necessary to saturate each scene with as much patriotic imagery that the film soars way past the boundaries of blatant-but-fun patriotism and overdoses on jingoism to the point self-parody. As I was watching the film, I kept a running tally of every gratuitous shot of the American Flag. By my count, it was no fewer than 15. God help us for White House Down.
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Olympus Has Fallen
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Written by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt
Starring Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Angela Bassett, Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd, Dylan McDermott, and Rick Yune.
Rated R for mean terrorists, gratuitous jingoism, and Gerard Butler making sure every last motherfucker gets what’s coming.
Running time 130 minutes.
