Last night’s “feature” was Angel Has Fallen, third in the “ … Has Fallen” trilogy starring Gerard Butler as U.S. Secret Service agent Mike Banning, essentially a superhero who in the first two films, Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen, saved the U.S. President (Aaron Eckhardt) from assassination by terrorists, North Koreans in the first film and Middle Easterners in the second. The Black director Antoine Fuqua did Olympus Has Fallen and told reporters he had taken the script because the terrorists were not from a Muslim country; when he got the script for London Has Fallen and the terrorists were Muslims, he bowed out and Babak Naiafi took over. Angel Has Fallen had yet a third director — Ric Roman Waugh, who also gets a screenplay credit with Robert Mark Kamen and Matt Cook, though the “original” story is credited to Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt — and the film has the usual flaws of something written by a committee: gaping plot holes and an overall sense that we’ve seen this before. It’s the kind of movie that often inspires me to say, “written — or at least compiled,” since all too often a movie with this many writers seems stuck together, Frankenstein-style, from bits and pieces of older and better films. In the previous two films Mike Banning saved the President from enemies foreign; this time the enemies are domestic. The film opens with an elaborate action sequence that turns out to be a war-games training exercise, after which Banning tells someone who screwed up, “If you don’t train like it’s real, you’re dead when it is.” (Cliché Bank deposit alert!)
Then the action proper begins as Banning leads a Secret Service detail protecting U.S. President Trumbull (Morgan Freeman, the only actor besides Butler who’s been in all three “ … Has Fallen” movies, though his character has steadily risen from Speaker of the House in Olympus to vice-president in London and president here) while he’s on a private lake fishing. Only Trumbull has been set up for an assassination by a group of fighters — at this stage we still don’t know who they are or what they’re after — who have a fully professional military rocket-launcher that sends out waves of bat-like drones, each one of which is capable of blowing up just about anything in the area. Banning saves the President by forcing him to swim underwater, though when the attack subsides Turnbull, though still alive, is in a coma and is immediately hospitalized. His vice-president, Kirby (Tim Blake Nelson, who according to imdb.com was deliberately made up to look like current-day Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who produced several movies — including the quite good and surprisingly anti-capitalist The Accountant — before joining the Trump administration), invokes the 25th Amendment and starts preparing for an attack on Russia, since the mysterious people who attacked the President faked it to look like Banning was responsible for the attack (they even planted his DNA on the trigger of their rocket launcher — though the writing committee doesn’t even drop a hint as to how they obtained it — while themselves wearing light blue haz-mat suits and dark blue gloves, which led me to joke, “The President is being attacked by the Blue Man Group?”) and Russia paid him $10 million to do it.
This puts Mike Banning in the classic position of an Alfred Hitchcock hero, unjustly accused of a crime and realizing that his only chance of clearing himself is to avoid getting arrested and use his Secret Service skills to track down the real culprits — though the film’s high-octane action sequences (nearly 100 stunt people were credited, as were four effects houses — quite a lot of CGI for a film that doesn’t contain a character with super-powers or any deviation from normal physical reality) mark it as closer to James Bond — and after Angel Has Fallen has already tapped the tropes of a terrorist movie, a Bond movie and a Hitchcock movie, the writing committee suddenly turns it into High Sierra: Banning escapes to the rolling hill country around Pennsylvania and goes to a remote, off-the-grid cabin inhabited by a quirky character who in a 1940’s movie would have been played by Walter Brennan but here is an old, grizzled Nick Nolte (quite a comedown for anyone who liked the young Nick Nolte and thought he was hot!) playing Clay Banning, Mike Banning’s long-lost father (though if he’s so long-lost how did Mike know where he is?). Apparently Clay Banning fought in the Viet Nam War and came home with the mother of all post-traumatic stress disorders, which led him to bail on his family and force Mike’s mom to raise him as a single parent. Clay helps Mike escape and loans him an old tan Chevrolet pickup (the sinister vans the bad guys drive are Chevy SUV’s and the President’s limousine is a Cadillac — did General Motors pay for product placement on this film?) and when a black-clad team of fighters corner them at the cabin Mike kills all of them and chisels on the wall against which he leans their bodies, “We Work for Salient.”
It turns out that Salient is a private military contractor headed by Wade Jennings (Danny Huston, continuing in the tradition of his dad John Huston, who played a similar all-powerful psycho in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown) and they were hired to kill the President. At first we hear the voice of the person who hired Jennings’ firm only on the end of a phone line and through a voice distorter, but about an hour into this two-hour movie we learn [spoiler alert! — though it’s really not that much a surprise: I guessed it well before the big reveal] that the mastermind of the plot and the man who’s paying Jennings’ company to pull it off is Vice-President Kirby. Apparently he decided to kill Turnbull so he could assume the presidency and start a U.S. war against Russia using private contractors — before he became comatose Turnbull had decided to pull the U.S. back from its military presence in the world and end the U.S. military’s use of private contractors altogether — and Kirby cut a deal with Jennings so Salient would kill the President and Kirby would attack the Russians with Salient’s forces rather than the U.S. military. In the dumbest plot hole of a movie that’s full of them, Mike Banning goes to an ordinary pay phone and places a call to his wife Leah (former “Queen of the Indies” Piper Perabo, replacing Radha Mitchell, who played her in the first two films, though they’re the same character) and their daughter Lynne (Jessica and Maisie Cobley — the casting directors used the common dodge of casting identical twins as a pre-pubescent character to avoid working either child longer than the maximum hours allowable under state law) — and the Secret Service and FBI easily trace his location. A real Secret Service agent being chased wouldn’t make such an elementary mistake, and I was surprised the writers didn’t have Mike make the call from a cell phone and “spoof” the call to make it seem like he was in a different location from his real one. Instead they have Mike Banning and his dad show up at home just in time to rescue his wife and daughter from a couple of Salient goons trying to kidnap them.
Meanwhile, FBI Agent Thompson (Jada Pinkett Smith, blessedly getting a rare chance to act without her husband and son in tow) and her partner Ramirez (Joseph Millson) figure out the plot, assume Mike’s innocence and launch an investigation of Salient — only to get killed by Salient’s security people when they go to the company’s compound. (It’s an intriguing action-movie variant on the Lifetime trope of the heroine’s African-American best friend who figures out the villain’s plot but gets killed before she can tell anybody what she’s found.) Eventually President Turnbull comes to and exonerates Mike Banning, and having left the dead bodies of two FBI agents behind at his compound Jennings decides to move his entire operation offshore, only first he wants to kill the President to salvage as much as he can of his conspiracy, and to do that he stages an attack on the hospital where the President is being kept — Jennings’ men slaughter a whole lot of innocent people (nobody on imdb.com has tried to do a “body count” for this film because I suspect it would be impossible for anybody, including the writers, to keep track) and blow up half the hospital in a scene I suspect was inspired by the real Oklahoma City bombing, though ultimately the President is rescued after Mike barricades him in a hospital office, and Mike and Jennings have a duel to the death on top of the part of the hospital that’s still standing that ends with Mike stabbing Jennings to death. Angel Has Fallen is a pretty good action movie if you can ignore all the plot holes — though the close-ups of Gerard Butler’s wounded face get oppressive after a while and his boredom with the role is pretty evident (he’s said this will be his last one in the series, though as with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine I suspect he’ll change his mind if someone waves a check at him with enough zeroes at the end) — though I lament the failure of the writers and director Waugh to do more with the angst of the manhunter turned manhunted!
