So here’s the thing: I like Die Hard. Die Hard was a great movie. I like several of the other Die Hards. People need to stop copying Die Hard. It’s been 25 years and there’s a Die Hard copy once a year. Die Hard on a boat, Die Hard on a plane, Die Hard for kids (cough Home Alone cough), and now we have Die Hard in the White House: Olympus Has Fallen.
The plot, such as it is, doesn’t deserve a lot of summarizing but essentially North Korean extremists (the new movie villains de jour) infiltrate a South Korean delegation to the White House and then in coordination with a small army that pops out of nowhere, take down the White House and have the President (Aaron Eckhart) hostage. The implausibility of all of this is so ludicrous that it even by action movie standards, suspending disbelief is impossible. The movie makes the Secret Service look like the most ineffective law enforcement agency in cinematic history. Plus, I don’t know if the post-9/11 world we live in, or if I’m just sick of it, but I find watching national landmarks being destroyed by terrorists to not be entertainment so much as it is tap dancing on cultural fears. Maybe that’s an overreaction, I don’t know. If others feel the same way, Roland Emmerich is completely out of work.
At any rate, Gerard Butler, playing a Secret Service agent (the only effective one) who made his way into the White House during the assault (because really anyone can get in there apparently) is now the only hope America has of not being nuked. Die Hard in the White House. I’m not sure how much longer Antoine Fuqua can get away with billing himself as “the director of Training Day”, but I think this would be as far as he can go. But what do I know? It’s doing well at the box office so it could just be me.
There’s nothing original here. It’s trope after trope after trope. There are multiple Oscar winners slumming in Olympus, so it’s not badly acted (though Melissa Leo was…not good….when she started belting out the Pledge of Allegiance at one point, I believe my eye-rolling was so prominent it was audible). I like seeing King Leonidas kick butt to save President Two Face while Speaker of the House Lucius Fox leads the nation (I love that everyone has done a comic book movie by now). It’s just dumb. Not badly done dumb, but dumb nonetheless. I’m rating it the same as I rated GI JOE 2, but at least that movie had an awesome 10 minutes.
3.75/10
Killing Time 