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| Not a still from the actual, real-life, presidentially commanded storm on the Washington D.C. Capitol Building of January 6 2022, this is instead an explosive poster for Antoine Fuqua's Olympus Has Fallen |
Mike Banning was a Secret Service agent who was close with the US President, until he was involved in the accident that cost the first lady her life. Now the White House comes under attack by North-Korean terrorists, and Banning decides to return!
Olympus Has Fallen is written by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt (The Expendables 3 (2014), both) and co-produced and directed by Pennsylvanian master filmmaker Antoine Fuqua (Bait (2000)), whose 7th feature it is.
The film attempts to marry In the Line of Fire (1993) with 24 (2001-10) but doesn't get anywhere near the quality of either of these thrillers. It is a shame, because Olympus Has Fallen has so many of the right ingredients. But although Fuqua is good, he is no John McTiernan here, and Olympus Has Fallen fails first and foremost because it is lacking suspenseful scenes.
Instead there is sketchy CGI by the barrel load, and scores of scenes of co-producer/co-star Gerard Butler's (Dracula 2000 (2000)) Banning torturing and punishing bad-guys. (You'll also get Melissa Leo (Bottled Up (2013)) as Secretary of Defense getting beaten up at length and forced to walk on shattered glass.) Without the necessary suspense one mostly just thinks 'yikes' at this and other unpleasantness - and the preposterous plot, which involves a bomb program in the basement of the White House that no-one at the Pentagon has contact to ... Olympus Has Fallen is also souped up in more than enough jingoistic prattle and possibly more presidentially sounding drums than in any film ever before.
Related posts:
Has Fallen franchise: London Has Fallen (2016) - Jingoistic and irrelevant actioner that passes the time
Antoine Fuqua: The Magnificent Seven (2016) - Fuqua makes a noisy party trick out of the western
2014 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
The Equalizer (2014) or, Mr. Swift Justice
Watch a 2-minute clip from the film here
Cost: 70 mil. $
Box office: 170.2 mil. $
= Minor flop (returned 2.43 times its cost)
[Olympus Has Fallen premiered 18 March (Los Angeles) and runs 119 minutes. Shooting took place from July - September 2012 in Louisiana, including in New Orleans, and in New York. Production scrambled through to be the first of 2013's two big White House attack action movies, beating White House Down to the punch by around 3 months. The film opened #2, behind fellow new release The Croods, to a 30.3 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another 3 weekends in the top 5 (#4-#4-#5), grossing 98.9 mil. $ (58.1 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 9.5 mil. $ (5.6 %) and China with 5.8 mil. $ (3.4 %). Rothenberger was sued by a John S. Green over authorship of the script with Rothenberger winning 175k $. Butler sued Nu Image/Millennium Films for 10 mil. $ over perceived unreported profits and failure to pay him according to a 10 % net profit participation deal. The conclusion of that suit has been kept under wraps. The film spun two sequels with Butler but not Fuqua returning; London Has Fallen (2016) and Angel Has Fallen (2019), with a third sequel entitled Night Has Fallen currently in production. The film additionally earned more than 38.2 mil. $ on the domestic home video market. Fuqua returned with The Equalizer (2014). Butler returned with a voice performance in How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) and physically in Gods of Egypt (2016); Aaron Eckhart (Thursday (1998)) in I, Frankenstein (2014); and Morgan Freeman (Edison (2005)) in Oblivion (2013). Olympus Has Fallen is rotten at 50 % with a 5.40/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Olympus Has Fallen?
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