London Has Fallen

Among the white house attack movies that got released in 2013, Olympus Has Fallen had the edge as it had a better content which kept things a bit sensible and intriguing. With London Has Fallen, the franchise tries to be too ambitious with the development. With proceedings lacking conviction, the movie is pretty dull and very rarely entertains with its thrills.

Story this time happens in London. The British prime minister dies and the major world leaders arrive at London for the funeral. The terrorists who were looking for a massive attack on the mighty nations, uses this chance and executes multiple explosions. The disastrous outcome of the event and how the US president manages to escape from the following events is what the movie talking about.

The beginning portion of the movie itself has this elaborate series of attacks and killings which surprisingly looks very dull and unconvincing. That’s where the over ambitiousness of the script really shows. I don’t know whether the movie has managed to get a release in UK, if the UK officials are as sensitive as Pakistan censor chiefs, the movie may not get a release there. The people who handle the security side of UK will feel like idiots if they happened to see this movie. The scale of attack the terrorists plans and the reason they give in the story about how they managed to do this sounds too silly. There isn’t a point in the movie where you find the imagination credible.

Gerard Butler has that cool and tough look to be Mike Banning, the security officer of President Benjamin Asher. Aaron Eckhart was fine as the most beaten up president of US in the Hollywood history. Morgan Freeman’s portions might have got wrapped in two or three days; He has very little to do in this film.

In the making, the movie doesn’t have that intensity. Five world leaders getting killed in a span of minutes is actually an alarming situation. But the making and scripting were a bit amateurish that you don’t feel any sort of alarm seeing those sequences. Things that happen after that where you see the US President running in the streets of London with his security guard is quite a ridiculous concept to digest. They might have tried to explain it, but all those attempts look quite pedestrian.  The visual effects lacked perfection and it was quite clear in those explosion sequences in the beginning. A few dialogues sounded cool, but largely the agenda was “Hail USA”.

On the whole London Has Fallen is a dull thriller that doesn’t please you the way its first part did. Occasional thrills are there to keep you occupied. But still the ambitious idea is just not working the way it should have been.