A man knew where he stood in the 80s and early 90s.
With Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the top tier, Van Damme and Seagal fighting it out for the scraps, and a legion of disposable pretenders going straight to video behind them, a bloke could queue up with confidence at the multiplex, safe in the knowledge that a chisel-featured white guy would be taking on an ethnically diverse pack of villains, and saving the world in time to get a couple of pints in on the way home before the pubs all closed at 11pm.
The very best of the era; the first couple of Die Hard’s, a couple of mid-period Schwarzenegger’s, are regarded as classics. Of the rest, we seldom speak.
Unless you’re still tooling around in a Ford Cortina with a Bon Jovi cassette stuck in the stereo, the world has moved on, and movies have got a lot more sophisticated.
But try telling that to whoever dreamed up Olympus Has Fallen.
Gerard Butler is a presidential body guard. We meet him in a boxing ring, sparring with Aaron Eckhart’s young and fit president.
It’s a scene full of moist eyed admiration for each other from the two shirtless men.
But, just as someone in the audience – it may have been me – yelled out ”get a room”, work intervenes.
Not 10 minutes later, Butler has let the first lady get killed by a particularly shoddy special effect, and now Eckhart can’t stand to have him around.
Months later, working at a desk job over the road, Butler is gazing longingly out the window at the White House, perhaps hoping for a glimpse of his old chum, when a shed-load of very topical North Korean commandos break in, kidnap the top brass, and kill everyone else.
Using a series of gaping plot holes to enter the building, Butler sets about doing a lot of stuff that could have been vaguely enjoyable if it were being done, with jokes, by Bruce Willis.
But Butler couldn’t deliver a punchline if it had an address and stamps on it, and the film quickly becomes a turgid and nonsensical mess.
The far-too-obvious cheap digital effects don’t help, but neither does the appalling script.
The film’s greatest asset should have been the president’s 10-year-old son, who is hiding alone somewhere in the building, but he is found and rescued far too easily, and whatever tension the film had is immediately lost.
After that, there is nowhere that Olympus can take us, other than on a plodding journey to the end, when Butler and Eckhart, bruised, bloodied, tousled, get to make up and share a cuddle on the White House steps, while battered Old Glory flutters in the smoke-laden breeze behind them.
At least the pub was still open.
OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (R16)
Runtime: 120 minutes
Directed by Antoine Fuqua.
Starring: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman.
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