Olympus Has Fallen pretty low
Carol Bowditch discovers that she’s not a teenage boy during Olympus:
This smarmy two-hour blockbuster frustrated me, not only because I needed to visit the ladies and felt like I couldn’t because I was sitting next to Australian cinema royalty, Margaret and David, but because of the shit acting and bombardment of Americanisms that were forced upon me.
The film begins with the American president reluctantly getting ready for a billionaire’s function. After some rigid textbook father-and-son bonding scenes, they drive to through a blizzard to get to the party, when the car gets into an accident. The President’s wifey ends up tragically in a frozen lake, leaving him and his son to morn. Fast-forward to 18 months later and we begin to learn about the life of a security guard working with the secret service who was there with the President when the road accident occurred. The event had left him temporarily retired from the force.
He comes back into action utilising his secret service training after word gets out that the Koreans are invading (oooh topical) with plots to start nuclear war. The President is meeting with supposed Korean politicians who, doncha knowit, are actually terrorists. He foolishly lets their leading men (and foxy computer freak lady), into the bunker and the next hour is a hostage sequence with lots of mediocre acts of torture.
At this point, there are a lot of “God bless the President, God bless The United States of America,” and slow motion shots of bloodstained American flags with bullet holes. I don’t like all that patriotic stuff, it didn’t really wash well with me, and it seemed the rest of the preview audience too, as the flag scene prompted a raucous bout of laughter from the crowd at this preview.
The film would probably go down well with an audience of teenage boys. There are lots of fighting scenes, explosions and bang bang shit that would make young lads (I assume) get all fired up. There were a few incredibly corny one-liners too, like when the security guard is heckling the Korean tyrant with the line “Lets play the fuck off game. You go first.” But, being a twenty-something female who isn’t overly partial to most of the action genre, I kept thinking, “how much would that explosion have cost?” and, “I wonder what it’d feel like to touch a gun”, and “this is really shit and I need to use the loo.” Pass.
Words by Carol Bowditch.
