Lionsgate
It’s perhaps unfair for average action movies these days. On one hand you’ve got the legitimately impressive and exciting John Wick or recent Mission: Impossible movies, and on the other you’ve get self-consciously silly and family-oriented nonsense fun like Hobbs & Shaw. How can any mid-range quality movie really compete with that? Well, they can’t, but you can still respect them for the effort.
Angel Has Fallen comes from stuntman turned director Ric Roman Waugh and follows secret service superhero Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) in the third movie of his ‘Has Fallen’ series. Here instead of the White House or London falling, Banning himself is due to fall in a transparently obvious frame job. Mike (getting close to being useless due to past injuries) is considering that he will likely be offered the job to run the Secret Service by now president Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman, who has now gotten a promotion in each of these movies).
We see in the start of the movie Mike hanging out with the chief of a Blackwater-analogue company, Wade Jennings (Danny Huston, who assuredly is not again playing a villain, right?). The two chat over the past history, and that’s all we need of characterization of Wade so it’s time for the movie to get going already! When will the Angel fall?
While off on a fishing trip with the Prez, a pack of sinister drones appears and attempts to assassinate the President and kill the whole team — except mysteriously Mike. So FBI Agent Jada Pinkett Smith (playing herself — well not really but outside of Gotham she seems to always play the same character) is investigating Mike and the obvious frame job, but of course since it’s not the big twist moment, she believes this lifelong public servant who saved multiple presidents is now a vile monster for ‘the money’ and would get away with it. Sure.
Naturally Mike escapes and is on the run from both the feds and the actual person who framed him, whoever that is! No spoilers, but … well … anyway we spend a bit of time with Mike’s wife (Piper Perabo this time) and even a silly interlude with Mike’s ‘living in a cabin outside society’ father Clay (Nick Nolte, in a bit of inspired casting).
The thing about a movie like this is that it may be predictable and uninspired, with themes here and there of mild political commentary (the very mildest) and attempts at normal film shots, is whether or not it’s boring. The good news is that despite the two hour length, the movie moves along at a brisk pace, with plenty of action scenes to spice up the less interesting ‘plot’. Gerard Butler does put in the effort here, even if his character isn’t exactly the most complex.
Butler doesn’t have the sheer charisma of someone like Jason Statham or Dwayne Johnson, or the slick competence of Keanu Reeves. He’s also hampered by not using his real accent — his real Scottish brogue is mostly unintelligible to American audiences but he’s more interesting when he uses it. As a former stunt guy, the director does have a good sense of how to stage things to a reasonable extent, even if he doesn’t have an inspired eye.
Angel Has Fallen is exactly the movie you expect it to be — an average ‘guy framed for a crime he didn’t commit’ movie that just happens to star Gerard Butler. Otherwise, this feels like a decent movie for a lazy streaming evening where you laugh at the wrong moments and joke at the silly attempts of the movie at importance. It’s not just simple trash, it’s mildly fun trash.
Angel Has Fallen has a run time of 1 hour 54 minutes and is rated R for violence and language throughout.
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