ANGEL HAS FALLEN ★★★
(MA) 121 minutes
Gerard Butler is yet to draw much praise for his acting, but you have to give him credit for perseverance.
This is the third time he's been called upon to save the US president from assassination and just to raise the degree of difficulty another notch, his Secret Service agent, Mike Banning, has to do it while on the run from the law. Showing a shameful disregard for his past record, his former employers are accusing him of mounting the latest assassination attempt.
Nick Nolte and Gerard Butler are father and son in Angel Has Fallen (2019).
To be fair, they have their reasons. The real culprits have put a lot of effort into framing him but we soon discover who they are and how they did it. While the FBI and the Secret Service remain in the dark, the script lets us in on the secret, successfully tucking the necessary bits of exposition into a series of action sequences which leave you little to time to think of anything other than the rapidly accelerating toll in collateral damage.
We have a new president this time round. Possibly suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, Aaron Eckhart has retired from the role. He announced some time ago that his presidential alter ego would be going off to play golf and tend his presidential library. It's now the turn of Morgan Freeman, making his first return to the Oval Office in 21 years. He was in charge when a comet hit the Earth and obliterated much of it in 1998's Deep Impact.
This time, the threats are closer to home, as you may guess the minute you set eyes on Danny Huston. He's an actor whose busy career has been based almost entirely on his talent for playing fork-tongued villains.
Jada Pinkett Smith is here, too, cast as an FBI agent who remains unimpressed by Banning's claims of innocence, but the big surprise is Nick Nolte. After surviving a succession of shootouts, bombings and car crashes, Banning heads into the woods to find a hiding place and Nolte staggers out from behind a tree. He's playing Banning's father, Clay, a Vietnam veteran whose experience of the war has turned him into a recluse as well as souring him on the government and all its wars.
And although he looks very much the worse for wear, he can still summon up the enthusiasm to pump some much needed pep into the dialogue. Butler, who's also looking very tired, perks up considerably once they begin to banter.
And despite Clay's anti-war rhetoric, he still has use for his weapons training. During the next stand-off, he manages to blow up much of the forest, together with scores of bad guys
The commercial success of this franchise has always been governed by its directors' ability to deliver the films at a cost deemed to be modest by Hollywood blockbuster standards. Seasoned action man Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) did the first one and this instalment is by Ric Roman Waugh, a former stuntman known for three low-budget prison films.
It was shot mainly in Bulgaria and the United Kingdom and its scenes of mass destruction are accomplished with enough panache to distract you from their inherent absurdity, at least while they're happening.
The series has always been slammed for its jingoism. Banning has come up against North Korean and Middle Eastern terrorists, emerging, battle-scarred but victorious, to confirm America's status as the best and most powerful country in the world. But this time, there has been a shift and the evil is within.
As well, Freeman's President Trumbull is a liberal with no taste for confrontation. Anti-Trump sentiment, it seems, has even seeped into the DNA of the Hollywood action movie. Or maybe it's the fact that the international box-office now exceeds the US gross and the flag-waving fails to meet the demands of the market.
Not that the genre's basics have altered. While the powers-that-be have to do a little house cleaning this time, the American way triumphs in the end and more important, just as much stuff is blown up while they're doing it.
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