Film: Olympus Has Fallen

Director: Antoine Fuqua
Genre: Action
Source: USA (2013)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Glynn Place Stadium Cinemas
Grade: B-

In his review of Olympus Has Fallen, Eric Snider called the movie the best Die Hard movie of the year, and I'm not sure I could get much better than that in describing this film. It's over-the-top, jingoist, unrealistic cinema, and it was a pretty good time at the movies.

In the first role that I've liked him in since 300, Gerard Butler plays a Secret Service agent who, for personal (and dramatic!) reasons was moved off of the president's detail so that, when the White House is assaulted in typical Hollywood fashion (an assault that relied in part on the president breaking protocol, so I'm not sure how they planned that), he is free to single-handedly take back the white house by kicking ass and taking names (when necessary).

This movie won't win any awards, and it will be on FX about two months after it hits DVD, I'd guess, but it's still a fun little action movie that doesn't have any pretensions of being anything other than what it is. Not a bad time (though I will admit a little surprise that Antoine Fuqua is making something this basic. What happened to the sharp filmmaking of Training Day? I guess that was a while ago. Maybe now he's just enjoying making movies like those he loved as a kid. Again, this fits right in that camp of 80s action movies. Die Hard in the White House indeed.

Describing this movie does make me feel a little like Stefan from SNL's Weekend Update: "This month's hottest action movie has it all: secret military weapons, an unexplained traitor, a precocious child, and Melissa Leo! Watch the government risk all out world war to protect one man against a plan that shouldn't possibly work in any way!" And yet, for all that, I did enjoy it. Butler is a pretty good action star when he's not trying to be a romantic comedy lead.

That said, I was slightly unsettled by this movie in that it was extremely bloody and violent. On the one hand, I think that's a good thing from a film-making perspective--in the US we always are afraid of sex and nudity but willing to mow down bad guys by the thousands, with little in the way of realism or blood. Cutting the blood desensitizes us to the nature of violence, so in a weird way I'd rather see blood and be horrified by it than (G.I. Joe-style) pretend that wounds don't bleed or that bullets don't hurt. On the other hand, it's hard to "enjoy" the popcorn style violence of this movie when it all looks so gory, because then the truth--that I'm being entertained by awful bloodshed--is a little too hard to ignore. It's one of those viewer paradoxes that I don't have a good solution to, because I was entertained by the movie, even as I was sickened by the blood. Perhaps I have more of the gladiatorial spectator in me than I typically like to admit. 

Alternate Film Title: "Aaron Eckhart Is Kind of a Crappy President"