Movie Review: 'London Has Fallen'

Back in 2013, Antoine Fuqua teamed up with Gerard Butler for a gritty take on what would happen if the White House was attacked by terrorists with Olympus Has Fallen—a few months later we got the more humorous, bro-tastic take on the same story, with Channing Tatum’s White House Down. Well, it wasn’t enough for the White House to go down, and now we have the follow up, London HasFallen. Handed off to Snabba Cash 2 director Babak Najafi, London Has Fallen is a ridiculous, direct-to-video-style blast of full frontal action. If a DTV movie had the budget to mostly level one of the major metropolises in the world, that’s what this is. So much better than the first movie, this knows exactly what it is and what its audience wants, and delivers with gusto and glee.

'White House Down' Movie Review

 

Big, loud, heroic, and fun, Roland Emmerich’s take on “Die Hard in the White House” (the first this year was the more serious “Olympus HasFallen”), “White House Down,” is also bloated, ridiculously violent, and kind of dumb. And all of this is wrapped up in one bombastic package. The film wears its politics on its sleeve, but it’s a jumbled mess of simple, watered down jabs at the right, big business, and the American war machine. I’m as left-leaning as they come, but the way the film goes about trying to have a message is so asinine and rudimentary that you have to wonder why even bother.