one word reviews of Movies and TV

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Olympus Has Fallen

IMPLAUSIBLE

Really?  Really??  You got to be kidding me...I'm...sorry, I should be professional here.  However, I'm literally slack-jawed after watching Olympus Has Fallen.  Dumbstruck.  Flabbergasted.  At a loss.  Flummoxed.  Perplexed.  Confused.  Baffled.  My shoulder and neck hurt after having tilted my head to the side at the countless IMPLAUSIBLE and ridiculous moments in this film.  And I expected it!  I...I just can't.  Okay, let me gather myself.  (Whew!)  Olympus Has Fallen is the Antoine Fuqua directed....WAIT...Fuqua directed this!?  The man behind one of my favorite films Training Day directed this mockery?!?  Tyler Perry makes a film a month and Fuqua gets stuck with crap stains like this?  Sorry, sorry.  Olympus Has Fallen is the...(gulp)...Antoine Fuqua directed film about a Korean attack on American soil.  Sound familiar?  Well it should.  Because you just got through NOT seeing the same concept in the abysmal Red Dawn remake.  Oh..oh this time it is the White House, not rural America.  That'll make it better.  NO!  No.  It doesn't.

How does the White House....THE MOST secured building IN THE WORLD get taken over you ask?

(SPOILER ALERT)

An airplane with more countermeasures than a Transformer and the most organized attacking force I've ever seen in my entire life.  Seriously.  The Red Skull and Loki both wielding the cosmic cube couldn't organize an attack this precise and infallible.  Patton himself running Skynet robots couldn't pull off an attack this perfect.  At one point I thought the entire population of downtown DC was just armed North Korean terrorists.  They come out of nowhere and just happened to ALL get mere feet away from, again...THE MOST SECURED BUILDING IN THE WORLD.  The supposed secret service decide the best way to stop a bunch of terrorist firing at them with a .50 cal is to just walk directly into the gunfire, bullets be damned.  If it was revealed later that this film was produced by the government in order to get the North Koreans to attempt something this stupid and IMPLAUSIBLE in order to legitimize us kicking their asses then nuking them, I'd buy it.

(END OF SPOILERS)

Look, I try my best not to spoil movies here on the site.  However, I find it to be irresponsible of me as a human being not to prepare you for whats in store if you do plan on seeing this film.  And for those saying that this is like Die Hard in the White House...Like DIE HARD in any shape, form, or F*%KING capacity...shame on you.  Shame...on...you.  You need to slap yourself in the face three times, genuflect to the awesomeness that is John McClane, put in Die Hard, then write a ten page apology letter to Bruce Willis and John McTiernan (In prison) for ever uttering Die Hard in the same paragraph as Olympus Has Fallen.

The acting in this is over the top.  It is cliched and wooden.  It is paint by numbers.  How can a film this stereotypically bad garner talent like Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, and...well Gerard Butler does anything nowadays.  When Sly and his Expendables do films like these, we eat it up because they are being ironic and nostalgically nodding to their earlier classics.  There are no expectations of weight to the performances.  But when you start sprinkling in Academy Award nominees in a film like this, it feels like you just caught them slumming it with some alleyway street walker on the LA strip at three in the morning.  They are all better than this.  Even you Butler.

Olympus Has Fallen is a big budget film that still has a direct to DVD feel.  All the stars and horribly CGIed fireworks they throw at it still can't polish this turd of a film.  If you watch it...brace yourself...then try to tell me I'm wrong.

(Sigh) Well, at least this will probably be the last film using this stupid White House under siege plot for a while.  (SUDDENLY HANDED A PIECE OF PAPER) I've just been informed that a film in June starring Jaime Foxx and Channing Tatum will be about the White House under siege.  And it will be directed by Roland Emmerich.

I'm moving to Canada.

2 comments:

  1. Tell us what you really think. I loved it.

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    Replies
    1. As mindless action films go, it does its job...clumsily. But the comparisons to Die Hard are insane. Die Hard is the greatest action film ever made. This Xang guy couldn't sniff Hans Gruber's jock. And I'm not even going to get into comparing Butler to Willis or both film's action beats. I won't get into tearing apart the plot holes and inconsistances. It's poor. But thanks for the comment.

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