London Has Fallen

 

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London Has Fallen is the sequel to 2012’s Olympus Has Fallen, which I was a fan of. It wasn’t great, but it was a ton of fun. Naturally, I was really looking forward to this movie. Did I hate this movie? No, but I didn’t particularly like it either, at least at first. It does get a little more enjoyable as the movie goes on. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have my fair share of problems with the movie. More than anything, London Has Fallen is a mixed bag. The acting is pretty solid. This is something you’re likely to get when the cast includes Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Jackie Earle Haley, and Angela Bassett. Butler and Eckhart have a fantastic chemistry with one another, and they are believable as best friends and in the protector/protected relationship. The standout has to be Gerard Butler himself. He carries the movie with the same level of charismatic badassery as Schwarzenegger or Stallone, and he seems to be having a blast once again. The pacing is awful. It takes a while for the plot to really get going before you reach the action that we went into this movie to see. Unfortunately, this movie is directed by Babak Najafi. The first film was directed by Antoine Fuqua, a man who has proven his capability with the action genre before. Here, Najafi proves that he doesn’t have the crisp style that Antoine Fuqua has. The action scenes within London Has Fallen rely more on shaky cam than its predecessor, and that makes them difficult to enjoy (or even invest in).  On the plus side, this is only prevalent early on in the movie. The action becomes far more crisp later on.The GCI is absoutey terrible. i kind of wish that effects were more practical. Overall, London Has Fallen sadly falls into that typical sequel trap. It tries to do bigger and better, but only ends up being an inferior copy of its predecessor. There’s some enjoyable-enough moments for sure. There’s just a lot of other stuff you have to wade through.

5 / 10