Angel Has Fallen

So if it drives you crazy to see action films, franchised to extreme and you hate Gerard Butler and wonder who it is you can blame, well here I am baby. Let me have it. These movies would be a guilty pleasure except I have no guilt and those of you Butler haters out there can just move on, I have yet to fall out of love with the action flicks he is churning out in the last few years. "Olympus Has Fallen" started this series and it was definitely the superior of the White House under attack films of that year. "London Has Fallen" is not a particularly strong follow up to that first adventure of Secret Service Agent Mike Banning, but it did have a lot of combat scenes that were fun to watch up to a point. This third entry is not as clever as the first, but much more effective than the second.

Morgan Freeman is now President, although that seems to have been the case since 1998 [Maybe the Longest Term in Office Ever]. Some malarkey about new foreign policy constraints and the use of civilian contractors for military support is the plot point that moves the narrative forward. It really doesn't matter because all we really want is agent Banning kicking butts and causing mayhem wherever he turns up. Fortunately that's what we get. The man about to be named director of the Secret Service is framed to take the fall for an assassination of the man he is supposed to be protecting. There was no secret who the villain is, let's face it, you don't cast Danny Huston as a friendly and supportive sidekick. There is a man behind the man villain as well and although I was pretty sure what was going to be coming, there was a short period where they thew me off the track for two scenes and I thought my stereotypical assumption would turn out to be wrong. Nope, I was right, they just paused a beat before getting to it.

The middle of the film is a chase sequence that works pretty well and is different enough from the events in the second film to avoid feeling like a rehash. Mike has to escape both legitimate authority but also the bad guys who are trying to complete the frame. There are some shoot outs, a truck and car chase and Mike occasionally has to sit down with a headache.   Buckloads of good guys and bad guys get killed in the first sections of the film. The opening attack wipes out dozens of Secret Service agents. Turnaround is fair play and dozens of bad guys chasing Mike get creamed as well. Nick Nolte appears in the film and provides a big lift to the movie with a performance as a paranoid survivalist with a connection to our hero. Maybe laughing was inappropriate when a battalion of men is randomly blown to bits, but the demented glee of the character and the audiences joy in seeing tome turnabout left most of my matinee crowd chuckling.

I've not seen "Felon" or "Snitch" so I can't say exactly what Director Ric Roman Waugh's style is. This film makes it look very efficient and clear. There are some creative shots in the drone attack near the start of the film, and the opening "combat" sequence is distinctive so that we do get an idea that it is more video game than actual combat.  Overblown action scenes at the end don't usually make much narrative sense but they usually don't need to. They simply have to get us the resolution we are hoping for in an entertaining way. Bingo! that's what we got. The film cuts down on the name recognition talent the first two films used to get our attention, and doubles down with quality second tier players. Instead of Angela Basset we get Jada Pinket-Smith, leave out Melissa Leo, Jackie Earle Haley and Robert Forester and insert Tim Blake Nelson, Lance Reddick and Piper Perabo.  You don't need to have seen either of the earlier films to appreciate this one, just know that the cast change is unimportant, this series is all about action.

Well there is some political and topical material, these movies are not satires directed at any particular perspective. We don't know the party of the President, we don't have a lot of strum und drang involving high minded principles. This is straight 80s style action. Good guys and bad guys going at each other with some elaborate set pieces and enough personality in the background to keep us hanging on through the slower parts. I suspect the demographic for this will skew older. My reasoning is that the audience for this wants to stay awake, they don't really care about being woke. Now let's have Mike take his knife with the President to Moscow or Beijing. Time to kill some totalitarians, not just entrepreneurs.