by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was London Has Fallen, a sequel to the 2013 thriller Olympus Has Fallen — a bit of a surprise because I hadn’t realized the
original film had done well enough to merit a sequel (though the major studio
sponsoring the myriad of “independent” production companies changed from Sony
to Universal) — with at least four of the first film’s actors repeating their
roles: Gerard Butler as Secret Service super-agent Mike Banning; Aaron Eckhardt
as U.S. President Benjamin Asher (Eckhardt was born March 12, 1968, which would
make him 48, but he’s still quite vigorous and handsome, a refreshing change
from the two old bags — Hillary Clinton is 69 and Donald Trump is 70 — who are
the major-party nominees in this
year’s election!), Morgan Freeman as Allan Trumbull (in this film promoted from
Speaker of the House to Vice-President — that bothered Charles but I guess we
were meant to assume President Asher appointed him to fill a vice-presidential
vacancy left over from the events of the earlier film), and Angela Bassett as
Secret Service director Lynne Jacobs. (There’s actually a fifth “repeater” from
the earlier film: Radha Mitchell in the thankless role of Banning’s wife Leah,
who in this story is expecting their first child — though when he found enough
time off from saving the world in general and the President in particular to
have sex with her remains a mystery.) When I saw a DVD with the title London
Has Fallen in the racks at Costco and Vons
my first thought was, “Ah! Someone did an instant documentary on the Brexit!”
No such luck; instead the plot, by returning screenwriters Creighton
Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt (though two other writers, Christian Gudegast
and Chad St. John, platooned in consecutively to revise the script enough to
get credit), centered around a terror plot hatched over years by Yemeni
national Aamir Barkawi (Alon Aboutboul).
The film opens with the Prime Minister
of Britain having just died — at first everybody thinks he just had a heart
attack but later it turns out he was murdered by the terrorists; he had gone in
for heart surgery and they sneaked something toxic into the anesthetic — and
the leaders of the world’s 24 most important countries fly into London to
attend his funeral. Only it’s a trap: despite the incredible security
precautions, Barkawi’s terrorists crash the event by disguising themselves as
London police officers and Buckingham Palace guardsmen. They start a major
campaign that includes blowing up London’s most cherished landmarks (though for
some reason the Big Ben tower is saved), assassinating some of the national
leaders with car bombs (we get a nicely done scene of a man with a metal
detector, ostensibly sweeping under a car for bombs but actually using the
device to plant one) and targeting the others with death squads in the guise of
rescuers, all to fulfill Barkawi’s desire to “bring the war home” to the West
instead of allowing them to fight in the Middle East with lower-class recruits
and unmanned drones. The fact that the terrorists are Middle Eastern is
probably what made the director of Olympus Has Fallen, Antoine Fuqua, bail on the sequel (it was helmed by
someone named Babak Najafi), since on the original film Fuqua had pleaded with
the writers to have the terrorists come from somewhere — anywhere — other than the Middle East, and they had complied
by making them Korean. After about 30 minutes of exposition London
Has Fallen basically becomes action porn,
but for some reason I liked this one better than its predecessor a) because
it’s 20 minutes shorter, b) because Najafi is a less relentless director than
Fuqua and the film is more evenly paced, with some actual moments of repose to
build up tension and suspense between the action set-pieces, and c) because in
this one Mike Banning and President Asher spend most of the crisis period
together, trying to flee the terrorists until they can reach someone in the British government who isn’t compromised and can organize a counter-attack, and
there’s an interesting buddy-buddy relationship between them even though the
President is clearly the second banana of the team (an irony the writers may or
may not have been conscious of).
There’s also a genuinely moving death scene
for Angela Bassett, whose character is killed early on — Banning tries to get
himself and the President out by helicopter, seemingly having forgotten the
lesson from the first film on just how vulnerable helicopters are, and of
course the terrorists shoot down both the President’s helicopter and the two
other copters escorting it: the other two copters go down with all hands but
the President and Banning survives, while Lynne Jacobs is fatally wounded and
gets a big speech before he expires, saying she never thought Banning would
outlive her and he’s got to keep himself alive long enough to see his child. Of
course, the terrorists have a “mole” high up in British intelligence, and he
turns out to be John Lancaster (Patrick Kennedy), head of MI5 (basically
Britain’s FBI), who’s exposed by the one person in the British government
President Asher and Banning can
trust, MI6 (Britain’s CIA) head Jacquelin Marshall (Charlotte Riley, a nicely
spunky and authoritative woman actor I’d like to see more of), when he
inadvertently left open his laptop after he’d coded in the password to cancel
Britain’s defenses against this sort of attack. There’s a nice John le
Carré-ish scene in which she confronts John and asks him why he betrayed his
country and the entire leadership of the Free World, and he says he agrees with
the terrorists’ critique of how we’re running the war against them — “that, and
20 million euros,” he ruefully adds. London Has Fallen is a not-bad movie, a good 99-minute diversion that
comes off as less relentless and therefore more pleasant than its predecessor,
though the final peroration of how Britain will pull together and rebuild seems
odd given that it’s about a city, and a country, that suffered far worse during
World War II — months of aerial
bombing from a world power (Nazi Germany) with a state-of-the-art air force —
and it (mostly) did rebuild.
