Eye spy… - Dead Man Down

Slick crime boss Alphonse (Terrence Howard) isn’t having the best of days.  Someone is playing mind games with him, sending him cryptic threats, and now his most trusted men are turning up dead.  During a violent shoot-out with the Jamaican gang he believes is responsible, his life is saved by enforcer Victor (Colin Farrell). 

But Victor is not who he seems; he’s actually a Hungarian immigrant named Lazlo and saving Alphonse’s life is all part of his plan to gain his trust.  Two years earlier, Alphonse and his men were responsible for the murder of Victor’s wife and daughter and he’s spent the time since slowly infiltrating Alphonse’s gang and plotting his elaborate revenge.

As Victor’s best bud Darcy (Dominic Cooper) investigates the source of the threats, Victor is increasingly drawn to his quiet, damaged, scar-faced neighbour, Beatrice (Noomi Rapace).  Beatrice is haunted by her own demons however and wants Victor’s help, blackmailing him into murdering the drunk driver who almost killed her and ended her career as a beautician.  With Darcy getting closer to uncovering his true identity and his complex relationship with Beatrice deepening, Victor is forced to put the final part of his plan in motion…

Disjointed and more fun than it should be, Dead Man Down feels like the not wholly satisfying illegitimate offspring of Rear Window and The Revenger’s Tragedy as Farrell’s Victor strangles and snipes his fellow hitmen while kidnapping a gangster’s brother and feeding him alive to some starving rats in order to set two rival gangs against each other.  As a robust gangster/revenge flick, Dead Man Down just about works thanks to Farrell’s committed, soulful turn (even if his Hungarian accent is more Ballykissangel than Budapest) and the action scenes, particular the confused opening drug den shoot-out and the climactic gun battle, are exciting and thrillingly visceral even if the action man heroics are somewhat at odds with the downbeat, noirish moodiness the film’s worked hard to cultivate. 

Less successful however is the Rear Window plot strand featuring Noomi Rapace’s scarred beauty therapist and voyeur.  Sure, Colin might be drawn to tragedy but you can’t help but think he could definitely do better than Noomi so their romance never really rings true and there’s little chemistry between them.  Truth be told, there’s far more sexual chemistry between Colin and Dominic Cooper’s BFF Darcy (What kinda gangster calls himself Darcy?) than between Farrell and Rapace and it’s mildly disappointing when Victor and Darcy don’t fall into each other’s arms after the final fadeout. 

With workmanlike, unflashy direction by Danish director Niels Arden Oplev (who previously gave us Noomi Rapace as Lesbian Goth Avenger Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With The iPad) and good performances from all concerned, Dead Man Down is a decent, if uneven, slice of hardboiled romantic fun.   

David Watson

Directed by:

Niels Arden Oplev

Written by:

J.H. Wyman

Produced by:

Neal H. Moritz and J.H. Wyman

Starring:

Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace, Terrence Howard, Dominic Cooper, Isabelle Huppert and Luis Da Silva Jr.

Genres:

Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller

Language:

English

Runtime:

1 hour 58 minutes

Ceryificate:

15

Rating:

3/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/dead-man-down/

CSI: Yunnan Province - Dragon

When mild-mannered paper maker Liu Jinxi (Donnie Yen) intervenes during the robbery of the village general store by two notorious bandits he arouses the suspicions of inquisitive detective Xu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who’s been sent to investigate the case by the local magistrate.

Discovering that one of the dead bandits is in fact one of the most dangerous, wanted men in China, Xu realises that there is more to the shy Liu than meets the eye.  Deducing that his mastery of martial arts marks him out as a member of the notorious criminal clan the 72 Demons, Xu begins to investigate Liu, intending to bring him to justice for a brutal massacre committed years before.  But Xu’s snooping draws the attention of the 72 Demons who have their own score to settle with Liu…

Blending exhilarating martial arts mayhem and the detective story with a plot not dissimilar to A History Of Violence, director Peter Chan’s Dragon, with its analytical protagonist and his intuitive dissection of crime scenes, is closer to Guy Ritchie’s almost Steampunk take on Sherlock Holmes, Xu’s stylish mental recreations of the film’s opening battle reminiscent of Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes and his visualising of events or Gil Grissom’s reconstructions on CSI.

More mannered and philosophical than your average chop socky flick, Dragon is as much a contemplation of identity, morality, redemption and the sins of the past as it is blistering action film.  Liu’s former bad guy, sickened by the crimes he has committed, has renounced violence and lives anonymously, trying to make amends for his past deeds.  But can he ever really balance the karmic books?  Does he deserve the chance to?  That’s the question that obsesses detective Xu, a man determined to rigidly uphold the law and dispense justice whatever the consequences, who has had to curb his natural empathy after his compassion for a suspect led to tragedy.  By the end of the film both men will have to break their vows and compromise their personal morality to serve a greater good.

An accomplished martial artist, Donnie Yen’s never been the subtlest of actors but here plays to his strengths acquitting himself well as both warrior and humble everyman while Takeshi Kaneshiro’s Xu is a classically brooding detective hero transplanted to rural China.  A major attraction for martial arts fanboys however is the casting of the legendary Jimmy Wang Yu as Liu’s estranged father, the villainous Master of the 72 Demons, a despicably evil boo-hiss bad guy who provides a respectful nod to the classic martial arts films of the Shaw brothers and Golden Harvest.  

With its bone-crunching fight scenes and moody rumination on the nature of morality and redemption, Dragon is both a knowing and sincere celebration of the martial arts genre. 

David Watson

Directed by:

Peter Chan

Written by:

Oi Wah Lam

Produced by:

Peter Chan

Starring:

Wu Jiang, Yu Kang, Wei Tang, Donnie Yen, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Kara Hui and Jimmy Wang Yu

Genres:

Action, Drama

Language:

Mandarin

Runtime:

1 hour 38 minutes

Certificate:

15

Rating:

4/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/dragon/

(Re-)Living The High Life - I’m So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros)

Camper than a Thai ladyboy drinking Babycham and watching Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert in the bar at Bognor Regis Butlins and featuring practically every actor he’s ever worked with (barring Victoria Abril and Carmen Maura), how much you enjoy Pedro Almodovar’s frothy I’m So Excited might depend on whether you’ve been waiting 17 years for a feature version of Scottish air steward sit-com The High Life.

Playing like a polari version of Airplane!, I’m So Excited marks a not altogether welcome return for Almodovar to the high camp comedy of Women On The Verge Of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! after darker fare like Bad Education and The Skin I Live In.  After an accident at take-off which disables the landing gear, things look dark for the passengers and crew of the Peninsula Airways flight to Mexico.  There’s a good chance the plane will break apart and explode on landing and there’s nothing for the three gayest air stewards in the world (Javier Cámara, Raúl Arévalo and Carlos Areces) to do but mix up and dispense there own special cocktail (orange juice, champagne, gin and mescaline) to the Business Class passengers under their care who include a middle aged psychic desperate to lose her virginity (Lola Duenes), an aging dominatrix (Cecilia Roth), a disgraced banker (José Luis Torrijo), a hitman, a honeymooning couple and an actor (Guillermo Toledo) with a complicated love life.  As the passengers relax and come to terms with their impending doom, truths are shared, inhibitions are shed, the Mile High Club is joined and the onboard crew entertain with their own lip-synch homage to Donna Summer.

Whether you choose to see I’m So Excited as a rather heavy-handed metaphor for a rudderless Spain trying to navigate the financial crisis – the doomed plane flying in circles, only the privileged business class matter the stewards having drugged everyone in Economy – or as a light, frothy farce in the style of Almodovar’s films of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s will probably depend on your tolerance for lazy gags about sex and farting but it’s hard not to feel disappointed by the film.  It’s funny but not that funny and the taboo-busting approach to sex and sexuality that made films like Labyrinth Of Passion, Law Of Desire, Matador and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! so groundbreaking and exciting now just feels a little superfluous, an excuse for cheerfully vulgar semen jokes and predictably fluid sexual encounters.  It’s a somewhat shrill sex farce with cartoonish rutting and a disappointing lack of nudity or transgression and the scene where a female character straddles and rides to orgasm a sleeping male member (fnar fnar) of Economy feels a little ill-judged.  Is it a comment on Spain’s business class raping the slumbering common man or just a bawdy bad joke?  Probably both but swap the sexes round and you have a much more sinister scene.

I’m So Excited is best viewed as a reunion of Almodovar’s alumni, showcasing the talents of actors like Cecilia Roth, Lola Duendes, Javier Camara and Bianca Suarez with amusing cameos from muses Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas and a haunting appearance from Paz Vega.  The actors are clearly enjoying themselves (perhaps more so than the audience) and Camara in particular shines as the alcoholic chief steward juggling disgruntled passengers and an affair with the closeted pilot.

Bawdy, vulgar and merely chucklesome, I’m So Excited feels more like a loving but tired homage to Almodovar than Almodovar himself, a screwball comedy that lacks balls.  It’s an entertaining, fluffy piece of escapism fans of Almodovar will love but anyone who doesn’t find the spectacle of a trio of middle aged queens dancing and lip-synching to Donna Summer’s I’m So Excited pant-wettingly hilarious might find themselves jet-lagged by the end.  “Oh deary me!” as Alan Cumming might say.   

David Watson

Directed by:

Pedro Almodóvar

Written by:

Pedro Almodóvar

Produced by:

Agustín Almodóvar and Esther García

Starring:

Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Paz Vega, Blanca Suárez, Carlos Areces, Cecilia Roth, Lola Duenes, Raul Arevalo, Hugo Silva and Javier Cámara

Genre:

Comedy

Language:

Spanish

Runtime:

1 hour 30 minutes

Certificate:

15

Rating:

3/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/im-so-excited-los-amantes-pasajeros/

Easy as A, B, C… - The ABCs Of Death

Let’s get it out of the way right now; as a film, The ABCs Of Death is virtually impossible to review.  Principally because it isn’t a film – it’s a mini-film festival with all the strengths, weaknesses, quality, tone and taste issues inherent in such an event. 

So, The ABCs Of Death gives us 26 short films by 28 of the most interesting, inventive and talented directors (almost exclusively male – the likes of the Twisted Twins, Jennifer Lynch and Elisabeth Fies are notable by their absence) currently working in the horror genre from 15 countries around the world.  Each film costs around five grand and lasts around five minutes with no space to breathe between segments and there’s no thematic framing story or link other than that of the alphabet and the child’s building blocks floating in blood that act as titles for each episode - oh, and each film must involve at least one death, often the more splatterific the better.  There’s slasher movies, monster movies, revenge movies, torture-porn, sci-fi, CGI, Japanese pink films, puppet films and claymation starring killer robots, Nazi stripper foxes, murderous toilets, flatulent schoolgirls, vampire hunting mobs, Man’s Best Friend, Russ Meyer-esque Amazons, doomed samurai, innocent ducks and Death himself. 

Wildly uneven, often childishly crude - there’s almost as much farting, excrement, and gouting semen as there is blood, guts and gore – the films themselves are something of a mixed bag; some gritty, some surreal, some stunning, some stunningly bad.  Some, most notably Kaare Andrews dystopian sci-fi V is for Vagitus are begging for a big-budget, feature-length remake.  Others, like Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s hilarious comedy of errors Q is for Quack (which involves two men, two guns and one duck) or Timecrimes director Nacho Vigalondo’s poignant A is for Apocalypse are simply good-natured fun while Ti West’s M is for Miscarriage is a supremely bad taste joke.  Though modern horror feminist icon Angela Bettis disappoints with her spider’s eye view E is for Exterminate, Britain’s own Jake West surprises with S is for Speed, an ambitious, adrenaline-fuelled Faster Pussycat!  Kill!  Kill! pastiche that owes as much to Ambrose Bierce and Ingmar Bergman as it does Russ Meyer. 

Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Z is for Zetsumetsu may contain ABCs’ most deliberately, shockingly, transgressively calculated image (rest assured - naked jiggling breasts are involved) but for sheer balls out, jaw-dropping nastiness that makes you want to wash your brain out with bleach, the masturbation contest at the heart of Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto’s L is for Libido may be the most unsettling, upsetting exploration of the dark side of human desire since Srdjan Spasojevic’s (who contributes the bloody R is for Removed) A Serbian Film.  Perhaps the angriest, most overtly political (and the only truly feminist) film however is the brilliant, stunning X is for XXL by French director Xavier Gens, a graphic critique of body image, self-loathing and society’s obsession with thinness and traditional concepts of beauty.

The most satisfying segment though is Deadgirl director Marcel Sarmiento’s D is for Dogfight, a breathtaking, brutal, visceral and beautiful tale of love and loyalty that’s as heartwarming as it is disturbing; more A Boy And His Dog than Man Bites Dog (though it does feature a man biting a dog!).

Like a Sesame Street segment for serial killers (think a coked up Cookie Monster with a chainsaw carving his ABCs into Elmo), how much you enjoy The ABCs Of Death may depend on just how sick your sense of humour may be but the beauty of the concept is its diversity.  It doesn’t matter if you hate one film, chances are you’ll like the next.  Or the one after.  Or the one after that.  Hugely ambitious and gleefully boundary-pushing, The ABCs Of Death is destined to be a late-night cult classic.

David Watson

Directed by:

Kaare Andrews, Angela Bettis, Hélène Cattet, Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, Jason Eisener, Bruno Forzani, Adrián García Bogliano, Xavier Gens, Lee Hardcastle, Noboru Iguchi, Thomas Cappelen Malling, Jorge Michel Grau, Anders Morgenthaler, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Banjong Pisanthanakun, Simon Rumley, Marcel Sarmiento, Jon Schnepp, Srdjan Spasojevic, Timo Tjahjanto, Andrew Traucki, Nacho Vigalondo, Jake West, Ti West, Ben Wheatley, Adam Wingard and Yudai Yamaguchi

Written by:

Kaare Andrews, Simon Barrett, Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani, Adrián García Bogliano, Lee Hardcastle, Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Simon Rumley, Jon Schnepp, Srdjan Spasojevic, Nacho Vigalondo, Dimitrije Vojnov, Ti West and Yudai Yamaguchi

Produced by:

Julie Lind-Holm and Petter Lindblad

Starring:

Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Lucy Clements, Dallas Malloy, Erik Aude, Kyra Zagorsky and Iván González

Genre:

Horror

Language:

English

Runtime:

2 hours 4 minutes

Certificate:

18

UK Release Date:

Friday 26^th April

Rating:

4/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/the-abcs-of-death/

The People Vs…hang on, wait a minute... - The Look Of Love

 “My name is Paul Raymond,” boasts Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) in the kitsch ‘70s title sequence of Michael Winterbottom’s The Look Of Love, “Welcome to my world of erotica!”  What follows, despite this bold assertion and the acres of nubile female flesh on show, is 100 of the most unerotic minutes you’ve spent in the cinema since that screening of Schindler’s List you accidentally took Viagra before, as Michael Winterbottom sucks all the fun out of a life of sex, drugs, philandering, greed and tragedy in order to serve up Knowing Me, Knowing Nude: Alan Partridge’s Boobs and Bolivian Flake Adventure.

Reuniting for the fourth time with director Michael Winterbottom, Alan Partridge once again delivers the same performance he did as Tony Wilson in Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People or as Steve Coogan in Winterbottom’s The Trip, playing pornographer, theatre impresario, property tycoon and self-styled ‘King of Soho’ Paul Raymond as essentially a boring, self-absorbed cracker of painfully bad jokes.  All that’s missing is Rob Brydon’s awful impersonations.  Beginning in 1992 with a shattered Raymond mourning the death of beloved daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots) and watching a TV profile of himself on video, we flash back to the black and white (literally) ‘50s and are off on a whirlwind tour of Raymond’s life and times as he spends the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s building an empire based on selling women’s wobbly bits through strip clubs, theatre farces and jazz mags, in the process cheating on common-as-muck wife Jean (Anna Friel) with posh glamour model and vicar’s daughter Fiona Richmond (Tamsin Egerton), having threesomes with models and showgirls and snorting blizzards of cocaine with daughter Debbie before her inevitable and tragic drug overdose and death and his retreat from the public eye.  

A glib, superficial retread of Milos Forman’s The People Vs. Larry Flynt that lacks that film’s depth, intelligence and humour, The Look Of Love never really knows what it wants to be.  Constantly chopping between tones and styles, one minute giving us larger-than-life Carry On-style caricature, the next straight bio-pic, Winterbottom never allows us to get to know or care about his characters. His vision of Raymond as a Midas-like figure gaining the world but losing his soul is rather soulless and, while light on laughs, feels like it’s played for laughs.  It doesn’t help that almost every significant male role is played by a British comic actor, all pitching their performances at the end of the pier with David Walliams good fun as Soho’s resident naughty vicar, Stephen Fry as a Lord Melchett-esque barrister and Matt Lucas shockingly awful in his one scene as the legendary Divine.  Also terrible is Inbetweener Simon Bird who plays Debbie’s husband (the bloke who wrote the Shake n’ Vac jingle) although a gleefully obnoxious Chris Addison steals every scene he’s in as Dave Lee Travis impersonator and coke fiend scud book editor, Tony Power. 

While Steve Coogan once again plays Alan Partridge, this time with exposed chest hair and a fur coat, the best performances in the film come from the women at its heart.  Anna Friel hasn’t had a part this good in years and tears into it like it’s Kobe beef, her Jean is a funny, ferocious perma-tanned cougar while Tamsin Egerton is sexy and smart as that most wholesome of British sexpots, Fiona Richmond, and she and her pert, frequently displayed bottom, are two of the best things about the film though Imogen Poots once again dazzles as Raymond’s indulged and tragic daughter Debbie, bringing a wounded bunny vulnerability and real pathos to a role that ill serves the real Debbie.  While she may not have been much of a singer and daddy may have bankrolled a show for her, there was a lot more to the real Debbie than just nepotism.  By all accounts she was one tough, capable, foul-mouthed cookie, running her father’s publishing empire while battling breast cancer and her own demons.  But Winterbottom and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh instead opt to portray her as a talentless spoiled brat, forever trying to be the equal of her father.  The real Debbie would probably have had their balls for breakfast for such a thin sketch of her.

And there lies the problem with The Look Of Love; it’s all surface gloss.  While he did have a fondness for threesomes, Raymond himself was far from the freewheeling, free-spending showman Coogan plays; he was by nature something of a prude and was a notorious miser, obsessively buying up Soho property while often refusing to pay staff at his magazines.  Perhaps the scene that comes closest to capturing the real Raymond is the uncomfortable meeting with the illegitimate son Derry (Liam Boyle) he abandoned as a baby and never formally acknowledged.  As he shows off his Ringo Starr-designed swinging bachelor pad to the nervous young man, it’s obvious that Raymond doesn’t have a clue what to say to his son but also doesn’t care.  He’s just not interested.  Ultimately, despite all the showgirls, all the sex, all the coke, what really gave Raymond the horn was money and its miserly pursuit, something the film never really gets to grips with preferring to portray him as, well, Alan Partridge with a libido. 

The Look Of Love is a panto version of Paul Raymond’s life that Raymond himself would be hard pressed to recognise. 

David Watson

Directed by:

Michael Winterbottom

Written by:

Matt Greenhalgh

Produced by:

Melissa Parmenter

Starring:

Imogen Poots, Stephen Fry, Anna Friel, Steve Coogan, Tamsin Egerton, Matt Lucas and Craig Izzard

Genres:

Comedy, Drama

Language:

English

Runtime:

1 hour 41 minutes

Certificate:

18

UK Release Date:

Friday 26^th April

Rating:

2/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/the-look-of-love-2/

Rebellion (L'Ordre et la Morale)

In the nearly two decades since his blistering debut La Haine, director Mathieu Kassovitz has probably become more famous for his acting role as the quirky love interest of goofy, lovable stalker Audrey Tatou in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie than for films like head-scratching potboiler The Crimson Rivers, his ropey US debut Gothika or the frankly stinking $70 million flop Babylon A.D.  So it’s refreshing to see him return to form with Rebellion, his earnest, uncompromising account of a little known and shameful episode in recent French colonial relations.

In 1988, with French internal politics divided between the left and right over the Presidential elections, a group of indigenous Kanak separatists attack and seize a police station on the small French colony of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, in the process killing three policeman and taking a further twenty-six hostage.

Assigned to resolve the incident by incumbent French President Francois Mitterand, anti-terrorism expert Captain Phillipe Legorjus (Mathieu Kassovitz) and his team travel from Paris to the island to track down the separatists, defuse the situation and secure the release of the hostages through peaceful negotiations with separatist leader Alphonse (Iabe Lapacas).  However Legorjus finds his efforts increasingly frustrated by the bullying military who harass and repress the local populace, inflaming their anger.

As Legorjus slowly gains the trust of the separatists and works to find a peaceful solution to the crisis, back home the rivalry between the left-wing Mitterand and his right-wing opponent Prime Minister Jacques Chirac intensifies.  With public opinion swaying in favour of Chirac who’s calling for a swift, brutal resolution, Legorjus finds himself in a desperate race against time to avert the inevitable tragedy…

Taut, tense and possibly his angriest, most satisfying film since La Haine, Kassovitz’s Rebellion is a searing indictment of French politics, attitudes and society.  Based on the memoirs of the real Captain Legorjus, the film is something of a labour of love for Kassovitz who worked for several years to win the trust and consent of the families of the nineteen dead Kanaks killed in the uprisingly.  It’s also timely given that New Caledonia is once again pushing for independence and will be the subject of referendum next year. 

Boldly opening and closing with the bloody aftermath of the French raid on the separatists, a shell-shocked Legorjus numbly walking through violent scenes of carnage as French soldiers beat and summarily execute Kanak prisoners, Kassovitz’s film pulls few punches, exposing the casual racism, bureaucracy, compromises, game-playing and political expediency that will lead to bloodshed.  Given that we know from the first shot that events are going to end in tears, the focus of Rebellion instead becomes the morality of the principals, particularly the honorable, increasingly frantic, Legorjus who desperately tries to avert the tragedy he knows is coming.

While it’s overlong and lacks subtlety, Kassovitz’s Rebellion is a powerful, intelligent political drama that’s quietly furious.              

David Watson

Directed by:

Mathieu Kassovitz

Written by:

Mathieu Kassovitz, Benoît Jaubert and Pierre Geller

Produced by:

Mathieu Kassovitz and Christophe Rossignon

Starring:

Mathieu Kassovitz, Iabe Lapacas, Malik Zidi, Alexandre Steiger, Daniel Martin and Christophe Rossignon

Genres:

Action, Drama, History

Language:

French

Runtime:

2 hours 15 minutes

Certificate:

15

UK Release Date:

Friday 19^th April 2013

Rating:

4/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/rebellion-lordre-et-la-morale/ 

Olympus Has Fallen - Rise Of The Heid-Stabber!

Olympus Has Fallen

Rise Of The Heid-Stabber!

When the most secure, impregnable building in the Free World, the White House, is attacked and easily captured by an army of ruthless North Korean terrorists and the U.S. President (constipated Robert Redford-impersonator Aaron Eckhart) is taken hostage by their vicious leader, Kang (Rick Yune), who’s intent on single-handedly destroying South Korea and kicking off World War 3, the fate of the world rests on the broad, manly shoulders of incongruously Scottish, disgraced Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) who’s still haunted by his failure to save the First Lady (an all too brief Ashley Judd) in the freak Christmas car accident (ho, ho, ho!) that opens the film.

While statesman-like Speaker of the House Morgan Freeman (played by Morgan Freeman.  And just how does Aaron Eckhart get to be the Man when Morgan Freeman is in the same party?) dithers and the sympathetic Head of the Secret Service Angela Bassett and douchebag General Robert Forster clash over how best to handle the crisis (Forster wants to send in the troops while Bassett wants to let Big Gerry do his thang), the bodies start piling up and it’s up to Mike to take the fight to the terrorists, rescue the Prez and save the world (or at least the USA) from nuclear annihilation.  But the countdown to Armageddon is already ticking…

So jaw-droppingly, astonishingly, blood-splattering violent that practically every red-blooded, red meat-eating male in the audience will have to hastily cross their legs in embarrassment and place a coat or bag in their lap to hide the mahogany they’re sporting, Olympus Has Fallen is dumb, trashy, hugely entertaining, ultra-violent fun.  Sure, it’s also shockingly xenophobic but the North Koreans are everyone’s current bogeymen of choice and the dirty S.O.B.s do callously gun down a patriotic American German Shepherd (along with much of the District of Columbia) during their attack on the White House so, you know, screw ‘em!  It’s a wonder they didn’t try to barbecue and eat the dog right there in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue!  These scumbags deserve to get their coupons chibbed* by Big Gerry Butler!

Practically every review you read of Olympus Has Fallen will have one thing in common – it will compare Antoine Fuqua’s muscular slaughter-fest to John McTiernan’s 1988 pared-down, stripped-to-the-bone, action classic Die Hard.  It’s Die Hard they’ll tell you, in the White House! 

They’re not wrong. 

With its indestructible one-man killing machine taking on an army of evil foreign terrorists, Olympus Has Fallen does indeed owe a huge debt to Bruce Willis’ finest hour (or 2 hours 11 minutes if you want to pick nits).  But it owes a much larger debt to the Steven Seagal-starring Die Hard knock-off, Under Siege where ship’s cook (and former SEAL) Seagal is the indestructible one-man killing machine, aided only by a big-boobed stripper with bigger beetle eyebrows, who must take on an army of mercenaries/terrorists who have taken over his battleship with the express intention of nuking Hawaii.  Throw in a pinch of In The Line Of Fire and a scoop of Team America and you’ve got almost the perfect Saturday night slice of movie wish fulfillment for the modern emasculated male.  In fact, possibly the only way Olympus Has Fallen could be improved is if it was just Gerard Butler and Jason Statham punching each other in the face for the entire two hours running time.

Far from fresh and original (the similarly-themed White House Down has lunkheaded beefcake Channing Tatum tread similar corridors) and in no way subtle, Olympus Has Fallen is stuffed full of slo-mo shots of the grubby, tattered, bullet-torn Stars ‘n’ Stripes, explosions that would make Michael Bay tumescent and a visceral, pulse-pounding air attack that results in such indiscriminate bloody carnage that it makes the opening half hour of Saving Private Ryan look like Carry On Abroad.

The supporting cast acquit themselves admirably; while Morgan Freeman is once more phoning in his customary elder statesman schtick, Eckhart makes a decent, intense President, Rick Yune is thoroughly despicable as Kang, Dylan McDermott is wonderfully slimy as Mike’s traitorous former best bud and Melissa Leo’s Defense Secretary is tough and ballsy.  The same can’t be said however of the film’s other female actresses with Radha Mitchell, Ashley Judd and, most unforgivably, Angela Bassett, all criminally underused. 

As untroubled by anything approaching logic and sense as he is by the terrorist horde, Butler owns the film. Despite a dodgy Mid-Atlantic accent that’s part Sean Connery and part Sheena Easton, Big Gerry is at his charismatic, tough guy best, swaggering through the film, despatching baddies left, right and centre, snapping necks, popping caps and here a stab, there a stab, everywhere a stab-stab.  In fact, given the amount of enemies, Gerry viciously knives in the face, a better title for the film would have been Olympus Has Fallen:  Rise of the Heidstabber!  You can take the boy out of Paisley but, on the evidence of his blade work, it seems you can’t take Paisley out of the boy. 

While it would be easy to dismiss Olympus Has Fallen as ridiculous, violent, jingoistic twaddle, the film’s greatest strength (other than Butler) is that it knows exactly what its audience wants and delivers.  Big, dumb, loud, thrilling and shamefully entertaining, Olympus Has Fallen is the film you’ll wish the last three Die Hards had been.

* coupons chibbed = faces stabbed.

David Watson

Directed by:

Antoine Fuqua

Written by:

Katrin Benedikt and Creighton Rothenberger

Produced by:

Gerard Butler, Ed Cathell III, Mark Gill and Alan Siegel

Starring:

Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Radha Mitchell, Dylan McDermott, Aaron Eckhart and Ashley Judd

Genres:

Action, Thriller

Language:

English

Runtime:

2 hours

Certificate:

15

UK Release Date:

Wednesday 17^th April 2013

Rating:

4/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/olympus-has-fallen/