The first credited screenplay of writers Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt seems the beneficiary of rush delivery, having been sold, cast and put into production in a span of less than five months last year, as part of the competition with the aforementioned White House Down. While Speaker of the House Trumbull (Morgan Freeman), Secret Service Director Lynn Jacobs (Angela Bassett) and others try to weigh the options of Kang’s demands, they also take advantage of Banning as their eyes and ears on the ground, working with him to first try to get the president’s young son Connor (Finley Jacobsen) to safety, and then affect a broader rescue plan. Banning scrambles to respond, and finds himself trapped upstairs in the White House as well.Īt the helm of this siege is super-terrorist Kang Yeon-Sak (Rick Yune), who’s somehow managed to infiltrate the upper echelons of the South Korean government. During an important diplomatic visit, the White House comes under attack, and President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) is hustled to his secure underground bunker. Driven by its concept, ancillary prospects could be better.īutler stars as Mike Banning, a former Secret Service agent still haunted by a professional failing 18 months earlier.
Joe sequel cutting into Olympus’ action audience. A more pronounced if smaller-grossing repeat of that one-two outcome seems likely, with mixed word-of-mouth and the impending G.I. In 1998, Deep Impact beat similarly themed mega-disaster movie Armageddon to theatres by almost two months, but the latter won out at the box office, by a cumulative margin of $550 million to $350 million. Olympus Has Fallen is the first of two movies this year in which a Secret Service agent has to rescue the American president from a paramilitary takeover of his highly fortified residence (the other, Columbia/Sony’s White House Down, starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, arrives this June). The thrill of the original Die Hard, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten, lay truly more in its brains than brawn. A slick technical packaging by director Antoine Fuqua can’t offset the lumbering plotting and patchwork quality of producer-star Gerard Butler’s vehicle. The action movie equivalent of the guy who, a couple years on from university, is still concerned with the sort of empty, cock-of-the-walk masculine posturing typically associated with teenagers, Olympus Has Fallen, or “ Die Hard in the White House” as the pitch meeting surely went, attempts to graft geopolitical seriousness onto a swaggering siege tale, to ridiculous effect.
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