Film Review - Olympus Has Fallen

Someone obviously watched Die Hard and thought I can make that better and sillier. They managed the sillier. It started well and I fooled myself into thinking that maybe this was something a little more than the trailer suggested.

I was very wrong.

From the moment the attack starts you really have to work hard to ignore how ridiculous the set up is, it starts with a tooled up Hercules taking out two F-22's with side facing miniguns with what amounts to an aerial sucker punch. It just gets sillier from that point on.

Ok, so it's not a thriller, it's a silly action film, I don't mind that. On this score it does deliver. There's some fun sequences and good moves, but nothing more than that. The characters are one dimensional and the story predictable. Surprisingly for a film with this level of budget some of the CG work for the initial attack is poor, although once the action is in the White House it's not so obvious.

The action just about lifts the film from poor to average, but to be honest, you're better off watching something else.

A nation's hopes rest in the hands of a former White House guard after the president is held hostage by terrorists in this action thriller from director Antoine Fuqua. Trying to adapt to civilian life after a tragedy ended his Secret Service career, former special forces veteran Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is thrust back onto the front line when a group of terrorists led by Kang (Rick Yune) attack the White House and seize the president (Aaron Eckhart). Now, finding himself the last Secret Service man left alive inside the building, Banning, overseen by acting President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman), must bring all his special forces experience to bear as he embarks on a one-man mission to take out the terrorists and save the president.
Olympus Has Fallen is available from Amazon