Olympus Has Fallen

Hollywood is once again jerking off in a moronic routine rip-off of a moronic line with a moronic attack on the White House from the moronic seventh season of 24. However, as much as it is stupid (and it is stupid), it is also unintentionally funny (and it is funny). (11/04/2013)

The trailer looked absolutely disastrous and overly pathetic, and also left me with the the impression that the effects would be unusually bad. In the end, though, everything is quite okay. I liked the fairly intense action with plenty of blood, several decent fights, and an excellent showcase of all possible weapons and various gadgets. The raid scene is about 10 minutes of very well-directed non-stop action. The details are slightly lifted from the new Rambo, but it doesn't matter, it works. Unfortunately, once we enter the “Raid 3”, where one hero with a mysterious past is in an hostile environment eliminates enemy units one by one, it’s full of clichés and occasionally stupid from a screenplay perspective, with shots of torn flags that are insane, but it is still a pure and crystal-clear genre film, and those flaws can be forgiven if you are fans of confident action and quality actors. (16/04/2013)

How do you combine the ultra-pathos of shot-up flags in the glow of evening twilight and a "down to earth" thriller about a highly trained bulldozer that someone hibernated during Reagan's time? You can’t. That's what it's all about. I enjoyed the references to similar 90s films (a tumultuous steady cam, president family guy and a soundtrack on the edge of long strings and pompous walls of breaths). What I really don't like is the total lack of overview - not only in the ode to US sovereignty and the flawlessness of its watch dogs (Butlers), but especially in the image of the North Korean enemy, who is so boringly truncated to a hateful and brutal core that the fight with them lacks anything emotional, and the enemy is completely uninteresting. Alternating solid action with theatrical (and de facto completely dehumanized) speeches soon ceases to entertain. A comparison with Die Hard is out of the question - this film looks much more outdated at its core - and where it tries to look more modern, it clashes with its simplicity. It's a pity, I was really rooting for it and had a great time for the first half hour. [50%] (08/04/2013)

I’ve once read an ironic comment saying that actors are the best paid prostitutes in the world. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but this film is a clear example of it. What they say here in the second half with a stony face, completely serious and full of pathos, is enough to put down even a self-deprecating masochist. And most of all, I felt sorry for Morgan Freeman. His participation, pushed through by the producers just to tick off at least one famous name, is reduced to the one clueless, apathetic expression, when it's quite obvious that Morgan has nothing to play with, and one annoyed expression of a few seconds that doesn’t make any difference. The American president here is a paragon of honesty, bravery, and an awareness of the gravity of his position when you're just waiting for the shit to really hit the fan. All the lines that fly through the air between Butler, the military staff and the terrorist boss are the essence of idiocy, and the slow-motion scenes with an American flag riddled with bullet holes, the 'Cerberus code' and the heroic cry of "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America!" will strike you as a major infringement on the audience's taste. During the first 45 minutes or so things go well, thanks to the old-fashioned 80s style action, with terrorists and bodyguards falling like flies (I hereby salute Arnold), but then the ghost of Chuck Norris possessed all the actors and especially the writers, and everything goes to shit in the blink of an eye. Thanks God for Schwarzenegger’s Commando, compared to this film, it’s a funny easy-going comedy full of wisecracks. (29/06/2013)

Within the genre, it's quite good and inoffensive, but Roland Emmerich played with practically the same theme in White House Down in a much more ingenious way and... And above all, in a funnier way. Indeed, exaggeration or any lightening of Olympus Has Fallen is what is most lacking. It is very action-packed, the occupation of the White House is briskly filmed and it all happens so fast that you almost don't notice the classic "All those pros got shot like a herd of sheep" crap. But everything else is meant to be so deadly serious, the characters swearing allegiance to the stars and stripes with death on their tongues, that weaker people with an allergy to kitsch, clichés and patriotism simply can't enjoy it. (15/08/2013)