Terror at The White House

Olympus Has Fallen (15)
Running time 120 minutes
Rating:**
ANYONE brave enough to make an action movie about North Korean terrorists storming the White House (known as Olympus in intelligence circles) and holding the President hostage, had better watch out for a fit of pique from Kim Jong-un, third son of Kim Jong-il, Supreme Leader and Eternal General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea.
Despite looking silly and run by men wearing the largest hats in the military world, these people, according to said action movie Olympus Has Fallen, are definitely a force to be reckoned with and need to be taken seriously.
For example, these terrorists (who, we must say here and now, are not exactly called North Korean terrorists) manage to: a) fly a large transport plane over Washington, shoot down two fighter jets, clip the top off the Washington Monument and crash it on the front lawn of the White House; b) smuggle 40 heavily armed terrorists, two refuse trucks with machine guns and an advanced anti-aircraft system weighing at least a ton into the area; and c) do all this without arousing any suspicions in any of the minds of the clever clogs of the CIA, the FBI or the Secret Service.
Bond wouldn’t have been fooled for a moment, you can be sure, but here we are dealing with disgraced Secret Service man Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) who, despite having a nice line in stubble, is not in the same league.
However, he does his best and pulls off a Bruce Willis-style ‘one man against the rest’ operation which leads to a huge amount of neck twisting, stabbing, shooting and general mayhem which leaves the terrorists, under the leadership of one Kang (Rick Yune), displeased.
President Asher (Aaron Lockhart) took against Banning when during a car crash, the agent carelessly decided to save the President and not his wife when the car plunged into an icy river.
But this doesn’t stop the agent rushing to the aid of the Pres when the terrorists strike.
There is plenty of action to satisfy the blood-and-thunder brigade and, because of a 15 rating, it is far more graphic than a basically similar action movie GI Joe: Retaliation, reviewed recently.
There’s also a good bit of The Bodyguard here as well, along with a touch of Clint Eastwood (In the Line of Fire)
But, despite all the fireworks, which look very good, and despite tapping into America’s understandably built-in paranoia about terrorist attack, the narrative just has too many holes in it to stand up as a serious thriller.
The true life action thriller films Argo or Zero Dark Thirty managed to rack up considerably more tension with a fraction of the big bangs of Olympus Has Fallen.