Filipe Manuel Neto
1
By Filipe Manuel Neto
**Real name of this film: How to insult half the allied countries in the name of one's own ego.**
Occasionally, American cinema seems to need an injection of idiotic nationalism. “Olympus Has Fallen” did that, but there are still some technical and entertaining qualities there. This film fails to do the same, besides treating other countries (especially the British) like morons. And so, Americans continue to think they are the greatest nation in the world and to compete with others like teenagers measuring their… you get the point.
The film is a sequel to “Olympus” and shows how the American president will escape by a hair (it can't even be considered a spoiler to say this, because the plot is so cliché that we already know more or less what will happen here in the act in which we decided to see the film!) to a terrorist attack which, in fact, is more like an act of war. Yes, a terrorist decides to send an army to kill Western prime ministers and presidents who gather in London for a state funeral and all the police and security agencies in the West were asleep and didn't see them. As expected, God saves the Queen and the entire Windsor family, who are not even targeted by the attacks and continue to have their tea in Buckingham without appearing in the film. On the other hand (or maybe a bonus?) the British still have the unusual pleasure of seeing the French president become food for fish in the River Thames... but, judging by the continued protests in France for a few years until now, perhaps the French are not mourning their loss...
I know I'm being deeply sarcastic, but there's no other way to watch this movie without feeling deeply insulted. The way the film places the USA as the greatest thing in the world and belittles allied countries, (but) direct competitors in defense and economy (Canada, Germany, UK, France, Japan, Italy etc.) makes us want to watch the US committing failure after failure which, in real life, ends up happening. Seeing all the international leaders casually strolling and dating when, in real life, they would be surrounded by security guards on their way to the ceremony is a very incorrect idea of how these events are organised. But it's wrong to expect a movie like this to care about things as silly and puerile as that thing called verisimilitude. When you have tons of action and a world-renowned city being blown up like a village in Syria or Afghanistan, what does it matter if all that stuff is credible? There might even be Mickey Mouse there with a machine gun! Who cares?
As for the cast… what can we say? We can say that, certainly, the fee was good, and that the film did wonders to the bank balance of the actors, in particular Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman and Gerard Butler, who did not have to make any effort to play the characters and who are here for the money. And if we take into account that Freeman is the most outstanding actor, and even he is far from revealing the enormous talent that we know he has, that says a lot about the overall performance of the cast, doesn't it?
The film tries everything to entertain, but fails. The weakness of the dialogues and the meager attempts to introduce humor would have deserved a punch in the face of the screenwriter who wrote them, who must have thought that we, the audience, don't have a brain. The action scenes are noisy, with the Americans running around London like a bunch of cowboys shooting and blowing things up, but the special effects and CGI are extraordinarily weak. Editing is another problem: unlike the previous film, which practically threw us into the middle of the action without much foreplay, this film drags on in the introduction without it being very necessary. What do we care if the Canadian PM's daughter fails her driving test, or if the German Chancellor likes men in uniform? And if Freeman's character is so fond of fishing, after this film he can go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and choose the biggest boat he can find there.
