Director: Antoine Fuqua

Writer: Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt

Starring: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Rick Yune, Dylan McDermott

Tomatometer: 49/41/79 (all critics, top critics, audience)

Spoiler-free Summary: Leonidas is a Secret Service superstar.  One Christmas Eve, he elects to save the President’s life, instead of letting him die.  The President gets pissed, subsequently throwing Leonidas off his detail.  Eighteen months later, with tensions rising along the North/South Korean border, the South Korean Prime Minister visits the White House, a.k.a. Olympus.  Things don’t turn out quite as planned, and Olympus falls into the hands of a terrorist.  Leonidas fills in for John McClane, who was filming something else.

Two Cents: 2013 is starting to look like 1998, 2006, and a host of other years.  You know, those years when Hollywood collectively decides XYZ is the hot, new thing, subsequently multiple movies about the ame thing.  In 1998, we watched Earth get destroyed by a giant space rock in Deep Impact, only to see mankind (except for John McClane, of all people) narrowly avoid a similar space rock-induced disaster in Armageddon less than two months later.  Similarly, in 2006, we were mesmerized by The Illusionist, the first magician-gone-bad movie in quite some time, just two months before its doppelganger, The Prestige, magically appeared at a theater near you.  With that same unbridled creativity, we welcome Olympus has Fallen, the appetizer to the main course that is White House Down.  In most cases like these, the first course is satisfactory, but inferior to the second.  (No Strings Attached (1/11) vs. Friends with Benefits (7/11)?  I rest my case.  [Fun Fact: Justin Timberlake starred {though, with his acting skills, I should probably use a different word} in FwB, but only after recording an album titled No Strings Attached with N*Sync.])  While Olympus is certainly a satisfactory action film, we’ll have to wait until June 28th to see if it can break the curse of the first-born.

Gerard Butler is a man’s man.  Sure, he plays soccer with Jessica Biel once in a while, but who wouldn’t?  Butler kicks some serious behind in this movie, but he’s a good enough actor to be taken seriously, even when the story takes a hard left toward ridiculousness.  He’s got emotion and charisma; he’s not just a The Rock with a gun, as is often the case with action stars.  Of course, this movie is about one thing – action – but Butler does a good job of keeping the viewer invested in the story, while none of the other actors/characters do much of anything.

As President Asher, Aaron Eckhart is lifeless.  As Secret Service Director Lynn Jacobs, Angela Bassett completely loses Stella’s groove.  As Agent Forbes, Dylan McDermott makes the closing argument in the case for TV stars to stick with TV.  Melissa Leo is unrecognizable as the Secretary of Defense (she won an Oscar, for crying out loud!).

During the third act, the movie actually becomes comical, ending with one of the worst closing one-liners of all time (possibly on par with the closing one-liner in Vantage Point).   Of course, I may be a bit biased here, since I once wrote a screenplay about the White House being taken over by terrorists, but at least mine was a comedy; I was willing to acknowledge the fact that the whole premise is a joke.  However, Fuqua does a good job of keeping the action going throughout the film, making the weak plot more than bearable.  Of course, that’s just putting a Bandaid on a cracked skull, but it’s a common practice (For example, this morning, on a Delta flight, I saw a man ask the flight attendant for “one of those seatbelt thing”.  A moment later, the flight attendant brought over a seatbelt extender, an extra strap and buckle to be attached to the man’s existing seatbelt, because he couldn’t fit it around his stomach.), so, I’ll give him a pass.  Furthermore, the entire film takes place in The White House, one of the most interesting buildings in the world.  I did a boatload of research about 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for my screenplay, but I still learned a bunch of cool facts from Fuqua’s film (assuming most of the “facts” are, indeed, facts and not, simply, “facts”).

By the way, I’m 98% certain that this conversation took place a few years ago:

Film Producer #1: We’re making a movie about a crisis in the White House.

Film Producer #2: We should get Morgan Freeman to play the president during a crisis.  He’s done it a million times!

Film Producer #1: We totally should.  But, is it too obvious?

Film Producer #2: I know!  Let’s pull a fast one on everyone and NOT make Morgan the president.  Instead, we’ll make him the Speaker of the House, and people will be like, “What?  You guys are geniuses!  I never saw that coming!”.  Then, five seconds into the movie, he’ll become the ACTING president!

Film Producer #1: Let’s give ourselves a raise.

Should I/Shouldn’t I: I think there’s a Constitutional amendment that makes it mandatory for Americans to see action movies involving the President of the United States.  If that’s the case, you could do worse than spend two hours in a theater with Olympus.  Although he’s chosen some mediocre material this time around, and pinched a few pennies on the special effects, Fuqua is a supremely talented director (he helped Denzel win an Oscar for Training Day) working with a usually-stellar cast.  The final product is not nearly as great as the sum of its parts, but you will be entertained by Olympus‘s action sequences, the terrorists’ intricate coup, and Butler’s ability to not suck when so much around him is sucking.

Sundae Rating: Two scoops