Olympus Has Fallen

Directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Aaron Eckhart, Rick Yune, and Dylan McDermott, Olympus Has Fallen is an action drama centered around a terrorist takeover of the White House.  Well, the cast, director, storyline, and trailer certainly sucked me into going to see this movie at the show, and why wouldn't it given that.  However, it does fall short a bit on some things.  Basically, it's a collage of movie formulas, notably the Die Hard movies and Air Force One.  If you ignore the absurdity of the plot, the first half of the movie with the Korean terrorist takeover of Washington is very exciting action-wise.  The Air Force's AC-130 gunship is hijacked and used to reign terror upon DC.  Yeah, I know.  But seeing something like that on the screen, makes it real easy to ignore or forget the improbability and absurdity of it happening.  From here on, it's up to Butler as the former Secret Service/Special Ops guy and the only guy left alive inside the White House to kill the terrorist, save the President and his son, and thwart the real plans of the terrorist.  At this point, watching the movie becomes very much like watching someone play a 1st person shooter game, sometimes annoyingly interrupted by the commanders and higher officials held up in the situation room, that only seem to give intermission to the game.  It's also at this juncture of the film, that the missing details of story-line logic become all the more apparent. The obvious question of how could this well prepared and coordinated attack be pulled off this perfect post 911 by so few Korean terrorist without the intelligence community or Homeland Dept. having a clue, is still beyond me even after viewing the film. So few terrorist and only one man can stop them, while the whole US arsenal of  police, military, intelligence, and everyone else can only wait outside The White House?  Not to sound like an extreme delusional right wing patriot, but I still couldn't buy the logic of it, although Gerard Butler does a good job in the role. Also, was it me or was Dylan McDermott's role or character (still deciding which) just fucking stupid? The writers of this film respectfully pulled out all the stops from not so implicitly referencing the 911 attacks, the Seals assault on the Bin Laden compound, and the present situation with North Korea.  I also give the film credit for directly touching on many issues in dealing with the global war on terror and nuclear deterrence. No spoiler alert here, but the directive of saving the President at all cost, is really put to the test and momentarily picks up the dimension of the terrorist's plot in the second half. It's a decent enough action movie and certainly enough to bring in an audience and keep them entertained, although excessively drippy with obligatory patriotism far too contrived.  But let's hope that this next film (White House Down starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx) about terrorist taking over the White House, will fare better this year.  If anyone has seen The Raid: Redemption, I think the martial artist guy who played Mad Dog was in here as one of the terrorist uncredited, who unfortunately got taken out way too fast.