Angel Has Fallen review

ANGEL HAS FALLEN:

YEP, ANOTHER ONE OF THESE AND SOMEHOW EVEN DUMBER AND LAZIER THAN ITS PREDECESSORS!

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: * ½ out of 4

LIONSGATE

Gerard Butler in Angel Has Fallen

            Gerard Butler (Tomorrow Never Dies, 300, How to Train Your Dragon trilogy) is back as Secret Service agent Mike Banning in Angel Has Fallen, the third installment of the Fallen trilogy following 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen and 2016’s London Has Fallen. Before we dive into the latest chapter, let me take a moment to discuss my thoughts on its predecessors.

            The first film Olympus Has Fallen objectively is not a good movie and has a lot of cheesy, over-the-top moments but makes for a flawed but fun action movie that even spawned its own rip-off the exact same year with Roland Emmerich’s White House Down. The sequel on the other hand London Has Fallen while I saw it in theaters and reviewed it a few years ago I hardly remember a thing about it aside from the exact same plot as Olympus but at a different location. 

            It’s a perfect example of a mediocre, mixed-bag franchise that you turn your brain off and enjoy some intense action sequences and corny dialogue for a couple hours. There’s clearly a fanbase as they were able to spawn an entire franchise out of this finally coming to a close with Angel. 

            When the third film was first announced I was less than thrilled after the bland, forgettable results of London Has Fallen. Even the title sounded awful, Angel Has Fallen, isn’t that clever? A more appropriate title would have been Franchise Has Fallen because nobody was asking for Olympus Has Fallen to become a franchise outside of the film performing well at the box-office.

            But I tried to keep an open mind and hoped that Angel would return the series back to its dumb, over-the-top roots that made the first film a recent guilty pleasure. And…being disappointed by the end result would be an understatement. 

            Angel Has Fallen is a complete mess and while Gerard Butler gives it his all, he’s not enough to save the film from its loud, thinly written script, lazy plot twists, and action sequences shot so dreadfully it puts Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich to shame. Not even the action in this movie is good, which was one of the highlights of the first film. 

            After the events of the previous film, U.S. Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Butler) undergoes training at a private military facility and is recommended by the President of the United States Alan Trumball (Morgan Freeman-Driving Miss Daisy, The Dark Knight trilogy, Wanted) for the position of Secret Services director. But when an assassination attempt occurs on the president and Mike is wrongfully accused for it, he goes from a hero protecting the president to a fugitive of the law. 

            On the run with no one to turn to, Mike makes it his mission to evade his own agency while also outsmarting the FBI to find the person responsible for the attack and uncover the truth behind the real threat to the president as well as the entire country. This eventually leads to a partnership with his long-lost father, Clay Banning (Nick Nolte-The Thin Red Line, Hulk, Tropic Thunder) who abandoned him at a young age, as Mike fights to clear his name and save the world. 

            The film also stars Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Looper) as Leah Banning, Tim Blake Nelson (O’ Brother Where Art Thou?, The Incredible Hulk, Lincoln) as Vice President Martin Kirby, Danny Huston (The Constant Gardener, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Wonder Woman) as Wade Jennings, Michael Landes (Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Final Destination 2, Love Soup) as Sam Wilcox, Jada Pinkett Smith (The Nutty Professor (1996), The Matrix 2 and 3, Gotham) FBI Agent Helen Thompson, Lance Reddick (The Wire, Fringe, John Wick trilogy) as Secret Service Director David Gentry, Mark Arnold (The Edge of Night, Trancers 4 and 5, Teen Wolf) as CIA Director James Haskell, Joseph Millson (Casino Royale, 24: Live Another Day, The Last Kingdom) as FBI Agent Ramirez, and Ori Pfeffer (Munich, Hacksaw Ridge, The Hitman’s Bodyguard) as Agent Murphy.

            Overall, Angel Has Fallen may satisfy fans of the franchise but casual moviegoers will just get a barrage of bland action sequences over characters and plot with little to no sense of thrills or suspense that will make you want to shout, “Make it stop!”. What should be on-the-edge-of-your-seat excitement has been downgraded to an overabundance of obnoxious shaky-cams, generic shoot-em-up action sequences and many of which are either shot in the dark or shot too close that it’s hard to even make out what’s happening on-screen, it is some of the most poorly-executed action sequences I’ve ever seen, I’m dead serious.

            It doesn’t help that the characters are barely developed which makes it difficult to get attached to them and care whenever an intense moment happens. The closest I can think of is maybe Freeman as the president because well, he’s the man who runs our country and at least takes his job more seriously than ours in reality (FORCED POLITICAL SATIRE!), but for better or for worse he’s stuck in a coma throughout most of this shitty movie and is barely in it. 

            Butler is just doing his usual shoot first, ask questions later attitude from the earlier films and by the climax, it gets stale after a while. Not to mention the sub-plot with his dad doesn’t really go anywhere and just serves as an excuse to drop some exposition behind Butler’s character. 

The plot is the infamous hero turned criminal cliché used whenever a desperate franchise is running low on steam (Superman III, The Fate of the Furious, and Transformers: The Last Knight anyone?) somehow made even worse with some of the laziest plot twists I’ve seen in a while. All throughout the movie I was able to tell which characters were going to be killed off and who the bad guys are, absolutely no surprises and nothing was gained, if anything it felt like a lot was taken away from me…like my wasted time. 

Angel Has Fallen is one of the laziest, uninspired action movie sequels I’ve seen in a long time that ranges from dumb action movie fare to flat-out audience-insulting ridiculous and dull. Even with the talents of Gerard Butler and Morgan Freeman, it’s a loud, thinly plotted mess that just makes you want to throw up your arms and say, “The action is intense I guess but so what?”. 

If you’re a fan of its predecessors and want to see how the franchise ends, you might find something to enjoy. Everyone else should just stick to John Wick: Chapter 3 and Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw for your over-the-top action movie needs for the remainder of the summer. 

By the way, the new Roland Emmerich movie, Midway looks like crap too!