Review: ‘London Has Fallen’

“London Has Fallen” is one of the worst kind of action movies, which is that it is the kind of film that wants to mine real world politics in the name of action and suspense, and it does so without any nuance or actual thought being put into the situation they are exploiting, and as a result ends up being a gross reinforcement of outmoded stereotypes used to maintain a constant sense of general Fear and Loathing. What’s worse is that this particular movie pays a little bit of lip service to idea that maybe Western governments bring a lot of this violence on themselves, but that is all negated anyway with a couple awkward lines of dialogue and a specific character detail.

Basically this movie did start out with the balls to show an American drone strike at a wedding, something that does happen all the time in the Middle East, as drones are used to blow up all manner of gatherings of people as long as there is just a slight possibility of them killing an actual terrorist. And it would have been kind of amazing if the “bad guy” in the movie was indeed wrongly targeted, but they made sure to let us know the main baddie behind the whole crazy terrorist plan in the story is an arms dealer, providing weaponry for all sorts of armed conflicts around the world, making money on the backs of the dead. He does get to point out that this is the same thing the US government does, and they just don’t happen to like the people he sells weapons to, and this is a valid point after all, the ridiculous hypocrisy of selling weapons to some groups of people and labeling other groups as terrorists for doing the same thing. But just saying this isn’t enough, this guy is bad this movie tells us and despite the collateral damage killing him is a worthy cause.

Secret service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is pretty much best buds with President Whatever His Name Is (Aaron Eckhart), and he feels extra responsibility to keep him safe. They go on a last minute trip to London for a state funeral, at which point they find themselves in the middle of a massive terrorist attack. Banning and the President then spend the rest of the movie trying to get out of London safely. Many people die along the way. That’s your whole movie. Occasionally they cut to a kind of war room which I guess is at the White House, in which the Vice President (Morgan Freeman) seems to be telling people what to do, though really I don’t think they ended up doing much at all. For some reason Melissa Leo and Robert Forster are in these scenes and they say maybe one line of dialogue between the two of them. In the end I think all they did was locate one suspicious building in London. Good work, guys.

Also, to emphasize how bad this story turned out, there is a mole in MI5, but the character to figure this out and bring this person in to justice (sort of) is a character that we meet halfway through the movie and who does pretty much nothing. She lets Banning and the President into an MI6 safe house, and then she spends the rest of the movie looking at CCTV cameras until she kind of stumbles across the mole. This is Mike Banning’s movie, there is no one else to care about in this story except for maybe the President and there is no good reason why the final heroic moment of the movie goes to a character we literally just met. That is straight up poor storytelling.

The dumbest moment, the height of stupidity (or would it be the depths?) happens when Banning finally comes face to face with one of the leaders of the terrorist attack and tells him something that came across very awkwardly and highly defeatist, as well as xenophobic and flat out wrong headed. Banning essentially tells this fella that there will always be terrorists like him trying to kill “the good guys,” and that “we” will be here for a thousand years (he actually dropped this very specific time frame), and he’s telling this guy all this while he’s trying to choke the life out of him, and it just feels so horribly “us versus them” because Banning is choosing to ignore the reasons there are these terrorists to begin with, as so much of this violence is done in retaliation to Western government policies that were detrimental, harmful and even deadly, exemplified in this particular movie by the drone striking of a wedding. Instead to Banning these terrorists exist in a vacuum and only live and breathe to “destroy democracy” and “attack freedom” and whatever other talking points get thrown around in the media when it comes to this stuff.

You see, the whole “terrorist” situation in this world, the geopolitics of it all, is so much more complicated than can be represented in a movie, or even in a series of movies, and the simplification of what is actually happening is dangerous because people will still get their impressions of the world at large from popcorn entertainment like this, and this movie is peddling a bunch of barely thought out bullshit. “London Has Fallen” is weirdly resigned to the idea of global terrorism just being the new name of the game, with no end in sight, and in a morally black-and-white manner. You are with us or you are against us and if you are against us then you are going to lose because we have drones and a hardened indomitable spirit born from “whiskey and bad decisions.”

It would help if the rest of the movie were any good but it really ain’t. The action is mediocre, which is to say, par for the course, the little bit of mystery in the movie isn’t even all that mysterious or interesting, and it can’t be said enough that this movie is just dumb, dumb as a bag of bricks drowned in the River Thames. This is the kind of dumb movie that has a dying character look up at Mike Banning and actually say “Make those fuckers PAY.” A character in a movie released in 2016 actually says that. This is the kind of dumb movie that would set up a final showdown between Banning and a terrorist, only to have the terrorist die in an explosion. Oooo, how satisfying!

Fuck this movie.