Blazed Movie Reviews: ‘Olympus Has Fallen’

FilmDistrict

I can’t smoke pot at home anymore because thanks, Obama. So I do it at the movies. This week, the White House turns into a battleground in Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen.

You know what the best action scene set in the White House is? That part at the beginning of X-Men 2 or X2 or whatever they called in when Nightcrawler busts into the Oval Office and teleports around like a badass busting up Secret Service agents willy-nilly before leaving a little note for the Prez. That’s an awesome scene. Nothing in Olympus Has Fallen is as good as that scene.

That said, this isn’t really that bad a movie. I don’t understand what the deal with Gerard Butler is. He’s in so many movies and it seems like he doesn’t really care about “quality” per se. That can be cool if you’re a dude who likes to make money and doesn’t care about your legacy. In this movie he plays a Secret Service agent on desk duty when the White House is taken over by a bunch of North Koreans.

Guys, come on. I know that North Korea is like the only country that can be movie villains now, but who is actually scared of them? Sure, they’re crazy as a poophouse rat but they can’t actually do anything. Everybody there is starving to death. They can barely make a nuclear bomb work right. Between Red Dawn and this it’s just laughable. North Korea couldn’t invade my bathroom.

But here they manage to take the White House and make President Aaron “Two-Face” Eckhart hostage. Gerard Butler is the only dude who can save him. So it’s basically Die Hard, but like most movies that try to be Die Hard it’s not as good as Die Hard. The villain is a really boring Korean guy. A lot of guys get killed (some pretty brutally) but the special effects are really bad. Can we stop doing computer blood splatters? Regular blood packets were fine in the 80s when they made Commando, this computer stuff just looks awful. Get a stuntman and blow his chest up. Apparently all the CGI was done in Bulgaria which sounds like a joke but is actually true.

This movie is perfectly OK. It’s mindless and disposable but it didn’t piss me off too much. I’d say go see it if you like watching people get murdered and tortured.

There’s another White House terrorist action movie coming out this year – White House Down, with Channing Tatum as Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx as Aaron Eckhart. That one doesn’t have North Koreans in it.

Disclaimer: I fixed all the spelling and grammar mistakes but left everything else in.