“…an absolutely bad ass ride from start to finish…”

Last night I watched the movie that I always confuse with White House down, Olympus Has Fallen. Now you maybe wondering, did I mean to watch Olympus Has Fallen, or did I just mistake it yet again for White House Down? And the answer to that is that I did indeed mean to watch Olympus Has Fallen, specifically in preparation for the sequel, London Has Fallen, which releases tomorrow. Now I try not to judge books by their covers but in my mind Olympus Has Fallen was always the worst of the two movies (the two movies being Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down). I’m not sure how I got that idea in my head (because I hadn’t seen either film until last night), but I have been thinking about it and I think I have narrowed it down to White House Down including more jokes in the trailer. I just assumed that Olympus Has Fallen would take itself very seriously, and I now know that it was naive of me to think that. I guess I should give a quick plot rundown. Gerard Butler plays a dude who was part of the secret service, but then after an accident involving the president, was let go. The White House then gets attacked (and essentially conquered) by North Korean extremists, and Gerard Butler was able to quickly get inside of the White House as the attacks were starting. What we then see is two hours of Gerard Butler being like John McClane (not Die Hard 1 John McClane who is just a normal guy, more like Live Free or Die Hard John McClane who is practically a superhero) killing terrorists in the White House in an attempt to save the president. If that synopsis didn’t excite you, either I’m a bad writer, or this movie just isn’t for you. But I, for one, loved Olympus Has Fallen.

To start my review, I want to talk about the flaws of this movie, or should I say flaw. The special effects in this movie were dog shit. They weren’t just bad, they were the worst I had seen in a long time. It was almost like a movie that would air on the SciFi (or SyFy however the fuck they spell it) channel. Its disappointing to have effects that fall so short, because many really cool sequences were ruined because they looked like they were part of a video game for the Playstation 2. It disappoints me when movies do this, instead of finding creative workarounds to kind of hide their shitty effects they just throw caution to the wind and bear it all. And I understand that some of the effects (like a giant plane crashing) had to be CGI, but even small things like blood splatter when people would get shot look absolutely terrible. That is honestly the biggest issue I had with the movie. Overall Olympus Has Fallen is a movie with two-dimensional characters, campy one-liners, and a plot that is so sparse that if it had any less in it the movie would have only been 30 minutes, but it knows this. Olympus Has Fallen knows what it has and instead of stretching to reach new heights, it just focuses on doing what it knows best really well. Seriously, I was never bored watching this movie. There were enough action scenes to choke a horse, and even when there wasn’t action being shown the acting and dialogue were good enough to entertain. And Olympus Has Fallen gave us one of the better recent Morgan Freeman performances, which is impressive by itself. Honestly, when I compared this movie to Die Hard, that wasn’t a slight against it because Die Hard is fucking awesome, and I’ll be damned if this movie isn’t better than the past couple of Die Hard Sequels we got anyway.

To summarize, Olympus Has Fallen is an absolutely bad ass ride from start to finish and If you like action movies you will love Olympus Has Fallen.

I give Olympus Has Fallen a B