There’s a line in this film spoken by Mike Banning’s doctor, after the character played by Gerard Butler goes for a checkup: “You’re a disaster waiting to happen!” The gist is that he’s been doing the same dangerous thing for too long and not being careful. The irony is that this is precisely what ails the movie Angel Has Fallen.
It’s the third in the “…Has Fallen” series, which kicked off in 2013 with Olympus Has Fallen, about a terrorist occupation of the White House. Director Antoine Fuqua knew how to balance the silly and the serious, evident in the scene where Butler’s Secret Service agent knocks someone out with a bust of Lincoln. You’ve been emancipated – from consciousness!
By the time 2016’s London Has Fallen came around with a new director at the helm, it was already starting to show some cracks. Angel Has Fallen, with stuntman-turned-director Ric Roman Waugh in the chair, is neither reasonably realistic nor consistently campy, and tries to get by on sheer firepower.
It might even have worked if the movie wasn’t also intent on being dramatic, stuffing 20 minutes of needless establishing chatter into its two-hour runtime before we get to the meat of the story, in which someone wants to assassinate the U.S. president and pin the blame on Banning. If you know who Banning is – heck, if you know who Butler is – you could skip the long fuse on this firecracker.
Good guys? Bad guys? Actors looking for a paycheque? You decide!
Morgan Freeman plays President Allan Trumbull, making him a rare two-term cinematic commander in chief. He first filled the role in 1998’s Deep Impact, not to mention a stint on the Supreme Court on TV’s Madam Secretary, and Speaker of the House in the Olympus Has Fallen. Alas, he spends most of this one in a coma, while various FBI types are certain Banning is the guilty party.
Of course, you make an enemy of Banning at your peril. At one point, FBI Agent Thompson (Jada Pinkett Smith) tells her people to triple the security everywhere he might turn up. Because doubling the security is for wimps! Meanwhile, Banning runs into a panoply of people from his past, including a private security consultant played by Danny Huston, and a heavily bearded Nick Nolte. Good guys? Bad guys? Actors looking for a paycheque? You decide!
Along the way the film trades in a variety of clichés, including the villain-in-plain-sight trope, and that scene where someone is busting down a door you’ve been led to believe hides one thing, when – surprise! – there’s something else there. Yet oddly, at no point does anyone speak the words “Trust no one.”
But I’ll say it here. In fact, even I might have been compromised. Maybe someone on the inside stole an extra star and planted it at the end of my review. Maybe the movie is even worse than this review makes it out to be. Regardless, here’s hoping that Angel is the film that convinces the series to take its doctor’s advice and just stay down.
2 stars
Angel Has Fallen opens across Canada on Aug. 23
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
