Movie Review – London Has Fallen

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Director :  Babak Najafi
Year Of Release :   2016
Principal Cast :  Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, Melissa Leo, Radha Mitchell, Charlotte Riley, Jackie Earl Haley, Patrick Kennedy, Sean O’Bryan, Waleed Zuaiter, Mehdi Dehbi, Colin Salmon, Bryan Larkin.
Approx Running Time :  97 Minutes
Synopsis:   In London for the Prime Minister’s funeral, Mike Banning discovers a plot to assassinate all the attending world leaders.

******

The world’s nightmare political scenario plays out in this nightmare of a film; the sequel to Olympus Has Fallen, a generic yet competent action thriller starring Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart, transitions to London, where the majority of the world’s leaders have gathered for the funeral of the recently deceased British Prime Minister, when a massive terrorist attack occurs, wiping out numerous world leaders and more desperately, most of the major landmarks in the capitol. Stuck in the middle are Mike Banning (Butler) and US President Ben Asher (Eckart), who survive numerous close calls while trying desperately to get to safety. London Has Fallen is a contrived, slap-dash action flick lacking gravitas or quality – many major visual effects shots are terrible (which is in keeping with the original film’s jigsaw-piece mentality, I guess) and the action is edited horribly – and while there’s a bare-bones thriller of quality lurking beneath the surface, the end result is a hodge-podge of monumental (heh) proportions.

london has fallen 1Look, I’m not averse to brainless action flicks, and I’ve seen more than my fair share of films purporting to be “action” that are very slick visual disasters. As creaky as Olympus Has Fallen was, it knew what it wanted to be, did it, and didn’t try and making a silk purse from a sows ear. I’m here to tell you, folks, London Has Fallen is the very definition of a sow’s ear. It has momentary pieces of tension, globules of decent action, but poor Babak Najafi can’t direct on this scale to save his life, and the obviously stretched budget can’t accommodate the widescreen locale and audience expectation with any sense of surety. The plot, while designed as yet another “let’s destroy major world landmarks” exercise in face-slapping tedium, provides a modicum of alacrity although Butler’s bullish characterisation of Banning, who is anxiously expecting his first child to wife Leah (Radha Mitchell, who spends the film looking shocked at a television screen, or actually running while near full-term in a pregnancy, if you can believe it).

Butler’s accent wavers considerably, but as a square-jawed stabby-stabby hero, he makes a good fist of it. The script is inherently dumb as a bucket of rocks, and offers zero believability or logic to back up its wild narrative jumble, but Butler chews the scenery and copious fight sequences as well as any action hero before him, delivering several face-palm comedic lines that are more cumbersome than jovial. He’s backed up by Eckhart as the President, although it has to be said that Eckhart’s ability to carve anything resembling a human character out of his work here is bravely doomed to fail. The rest of the top-line cast are relegated to audience participation only; Morgan Freeman, an utterly wasted Melissa Leo (an Academy Award-winning actress who barely utters a single line in the film!!!!), a nonplussed-looking Jackie Earl Haley and the enormously underrated Colin Salmon spend the vast majority of the film stuck in rooms looking at computer screens, uttering blasè dialogue designed to move the plot along. Not to mention the execrable treatment of one of Olympus’ better characters, Angela Bassett’s Director of The Secret Service, whose character does what the audience probably should do about the same time and just give up on this film altogether twenty minutes in. It’s such a waste.

london-has-fallen-scene2As mentioned, the visual effects in this film range from merely competent to stunningly awful, to the point I’m surprised a major studio would consider releasing it like that. Large-scale shots of buildings exploding, helicopters falling from the sky, or car-bombs going off in city streets look fake as a second grade photoshop effort, while many of the film’s second and third-act action sequences occur at night to mask the budgetary limitations. At times the film just looks shoddy, a third-rate production hidden behind some astute box-office stars. It’s this lo-fi aesthetic which continually works against the film, hamstringing it to the point it’s more frustrating than it is entertaining. Hell, it’s hard to even laugh at this thing when it tries so earnestly to take itself so seriously. Babak Najafi, a Swedish-born director making his English-language film début here, lacks the keen eye of Olympus‘ Antoine Fuqua, although he tries hard to make things exciting in spite of his lesser ability. The editing ranges from jarring to pedestrian, with some terrific camera shots hindered by a razor-wire approach to the pulsing, pounding-soundtrack-inspired desire to keep the film flying forward to its own ruin.

London Has Fallen is the most obvious film in the world – the Bad Guys are obvious, the action is obvious, the outcome is so obvious it’s hardly worth keeping it a secret – and aside from some dynamic sound mixing or Butler’s insistently incomprehensible mumbling, there’s very little to recommend it. Idiotic to the extreme and virtually irredeemable as a major piece of cinema, London Has Fallen lacks the fist-pump patriotism of its predecessor, feels somewhat xenophobic, and becomes a tedious, predictable steamroller of genre archetypes. Specifically: Banning spends an early scene hunched over his laptop with a finger on the “send” button of a resignation email. You just know how that turns out at the end. Exactly how you feel after watching it: resignation to a wasted 90 minutes.

E-Rating

 

 

 

 

 

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7 thoughts on “Movie Review – London Has Fallen

  1. It's beyond awful! Great review by the way Rodney, you hit the nail on the head with many of your points. I particuarly hated the shoddy CGI as well as the inanity of the plotting. Even those willing to suspend their disbelief for a straightforward action film would be hard pushed to do so here. Everything felt fake, underpinned by that videogame CGI from the N64 era. Heck, Spielberg made Jurassic Park how many years ago now… 23? … and a film from 2016 manages to gives us CGI that looks more dated than his brilliant dino adventure. I suppose I did notice the flag-waving maybe a little more than you – it was noticeably grating, particularly how the Brits were shown to be completely useless and only saved by our American hero (who even told an SAS unit that he'd handle things himself – the SAS being the world's elite anti-terrorism unit, by hey-ho).
    My recent post “London Has Fallen”: A Soiled Product Of Hollywood’s Dash For Cash

    1. So. Many. Problems.

      Yeah, jingoism and sub-par effects aside, had this film been better written and not some half-assed generic shitstorm, it might have been okay. The Asylum woulda chucked this turd out for being too shit.

  2. I haven't seen Olympus but I have seen this. Wish I hadn't. All I remember was when Gerard Butler was looking at the British agent woman's drone surveillance thing and asked her if it could zoom. Then after she said yes he suddenly knew exactly how to zoom it even though he didn't even know it zoomed! Goddamn this movie made me mad haha!

    1. Frustrating lapses in basic logic like this are probably the least of this film's problems, but yeah, you're so right. So much stupid in this film, it's incredible it made a cinematic release.

  3. I wasn't too thrilled with Olympus Has Fallen so I'm not exactly in a rush to see this one. This just confirmed my feelings.

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