Supremely Stupid OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN Falls Short Of Even Being So Bad It's Good

Now playing at nearly every multiplex in Raleigh and the Triangle area:

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN 

(Dir. Antoine Fuqua, 2013)

It’s DIE HARD at the White House! It’s AIR FORCE ONE on the ground! It’s INDEPENDENCE DAY meets DEEP IMPACT with the aliens and the meteor replaced with an attack by terrorists!

Yep, if you’re even a semi-regular at the multiplex, chances are you’ve experienced every single element that makes up Antoine Fuqua’s new action/disaster movie, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, featuring Gerald Butler as a Secret Service Agent fighting to protect the President (Aaron Eckhart) from a team of Korean terrorists led by the suave well-groomed Rick Yune.

When the film opens it feels like a subpar episode of The West Wing, with President Eckhart doting on the First Lady (Ashley Judd) and their son (Finley Jacobsen) as they depart Camp David with their trusted beloved guard Butler overseeing their transit. Then in the first of many derivative set-pieces, their motorcade gets into an accident due to a violent snowstorm, and Butler is unable to save Judd’s life.

18 months later, Butler is working a desk job at the Treasury (with a great view of the White House out his window he can look longingly at), but he tells Secret Service Head Angela Bassett that he wants back in the game.

Turns out it’s his lucky day because Washington D.C. gets hit hard by a crew of heavily armed, highly trained extremists, who by way of an aerial attack, car bombs, and soldiers disguised as citizens take over the White House (code name: Olympus), leaving its lawn and Pennsylvania Avenue strewn with dead bodies.

Butler, finds his way through gunfire and explosions to get inside the walls of the White House, while the President is 150 feet below the White House grounds in a bunker held hostage by Yune. With the President is the Vice President (Phil Austin), the Secretary of Defense (Melissa Leo), and a fellow agent of Butler’s played by Dylan McDermott. These folks names and occupations are told to us in tiny type on the screen so we’ll know they’re important.

Also given to us is the location and time, as in when Butler finds himself in the Oval Office: “Oval Office, 9:04 P.M.”

The DIE HARD formula comes into play in a scene in which our hero Butler encounters a bad guy he doesn’t know is a baddie (see John McClane’s oblivious meeting with villain Hans Gruber in the ’88 original), and we get to see the White House getting even more demolished. It was so much cooler when it was done by aliens; the explosions aren’t as vivid here. 

This movie is also another in the long line of indestructible badass movies with Butler being able to take out waves of thugs, like Liam Neeson in TAKEN, Daniel Craig’s 007, or Jason Stratham in every Jason Stratham movie so there’s no surprises or thrills in the poorly shot and lit fight scenes throughout.

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is supreme stupidity on an epic scale with a ridiculously awful screenplay, written by first time screenwriters Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt or at least a screenwriting computer program they used.

I did enjoy laughing at it when I wasn’t rolling my eyes, and counting the clichés, but the mundane mechanics wore on me as the thing kept on chugging along. A lot of genre exercises can’t help but appear like collections of stock elements. I had a severe case of cinematic de ja vu when seeing JACK REACHER last year, with its done-to-death formula, but there was at least some passion involved there.

Without an original bone in its body and not an ounce of oomph to make it memorable, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN falls way short of even being so bad it’s good.

To borrow a line from one of my favorite movies, Terry Zwigoff’s GHOST WORLD: “This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.”

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PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER: The Film Babble Blog Review

PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER 

(Dir. Stephen Chbosky, 2012) 

I related to this film a little, my wife related to it A LOT. 



You see, she went to high school in the same era that the film is set (early ‘90s), cherished the same music (The Smiths, New Order, Cocteau Twins) that the central characters cherished, and went to the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW repeatedly, again, just like these kids.

Adapted and directed by Stephen Chbosky, from his 1999 young adult novel, PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, concerns the coming of age of a high school freshman in Pittsburgh named Charlie (a well cast Logan Lerman). Charlie partly tells the story through letters he’s writing to an anonymous friend, in which we learn that he’s badly in need of friends.

Our shy protagonist soon finds them in the form of a couple of seniors: the quick-witted and openly gay Patrick (Ezra Miller, so showing a different side than in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN), and the shorthaired Sam (Emma Watson), who will surely be labeled a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” by many critics.

With Charlie, there’s more going on than just his desire to be accepted and fit in. Casually, at his first party ever, Charlie mentions to Sam that his best friend shot himself. There’s also haunting memories of an Aunt who died (Melanie Lynskey), so we see that Charlie’s development has been sorely stunted.

Charlie pines for Sam, but she’s seeing a pretentious art student douche (Reece Thompson). Charlie finds himself in an unwanted relationship with another fellow outcast student (Mae Whitman from Parenthood), which amounts to some amusingly awkard (and truthful feeling) scenes, while Patrick deals with a secret romance with the quarterback of the football team (Johnny Simmons).

Paul Rudd has a nice turn as a sympathetic teacher who gives Charlie books to encourage his interest in writing, as do Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh as Charlie’s concerned but clueless parents.

Although at times it feels like a big screen after school special (props to it totally owning up to that in a throwaway line), or a self conscious homage to the films of John Hughes, Chbosky’s finely tuned drama doesn’t shy away from darkness as it nails a time before cell phones and iPods, when teenagers actually talked to each other. 

They made mix-tapes for each other of what they passionately proclaimed to be “good music,” and bonded through songs on the radio that if they didn’t catch the title or artist they couldn’t easily Google.

My wife said that it was like seeing her high school years made into a movie. It resonated with me too, albeit not as strongly, but it struck me as funny, touching, and sincere in its depiction of friendship. 



Despite the technological advances, the themes of PERKS are universal, and should resonate with the kids today too. That is, if they can tear themselves away from texting.

PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER opens today in the Triangle at the Colony Theater in North Raleigh, and at Crossroads 20 in Cary.

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