Saturday, March 30, 2013

REVIEW - Olympus Has Fallen

Strange that in all the tiresome, repetitive TV advertising for this movie they never once mention that it "stars" the even more tiresome and repetitive Gerard Butler.

I guess it was my own fault - doing no research before buying our tickets - but when the opening scenes featured McButler's cheesy grin I groaned.

At least we didn't have to dwell too long on that grin. The film wasted no time at all before plunging into the action: a heavily tricked out aircraft piloted by two North Korean terrorists manage to fly within a few minutes of the White House before being noticed by anyone. Thus starts two hours of mostly implausible activity which do little more than paint the president's home as a marshmallow-soft target and the various arms of the US military as toothless, inept buffoons.

All except for our sporren-wielding hero, who single-handedly manages to avoid the barrage of bullets from a small army of terrorists that appear from every truck in DC, makes his way into the now enemy-controlled White House, and rescues the occupants all while achieving that most important objective: putting a bit of much-needed pep back into his marriage.

With all the current talk of North Korean military posturing, this film is at least somewhat relevant, although its message is unnecessarily full of patriotic BS.

And doesn't anyone see the irony in the film's tagline: "When our flag falls, our nation will rise" - when the lead role, the one person who does "rise to the occasion" is a bloody Scotsman?

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