“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.
