I would like to apologize for the very late review of London Has Fallen, I got busy with a multitude of things and only recently got around to seeing it last Thursday. London Has Fallen is very derivative of Olympus Has Fallen, the difference being that it's set in London of course, but I can accept that they would be similar because this is a potential budding franchise and in a franchise all films have a lot of similarities for good reason. This time around, all the world's major leaders gather in London following the death of Great Britain's Prime Minister and city-scale terrorism ensues. London Has Fallen has a lot of large scale action like the original and that's where the film hits it's mark. A majority of the movie outside it's action is honestly pretty bad. The editing is really choppy and the film feels the need to include a LOT of text for establishing shots and literally everytime anyone of importance shows up they feel the need to bring up text with the character's name and occupation but it comes and goes way too quickly so even if someone actually wanted to read it, they wouldn't be able to. It didn't bother me to much in the case of the establishing location shots, but a majority of these include recognizable landmarks that renders the text useless. However for the characters it was very obnoxious, especially since most of these characters deliver one or two lines and are of virtually no importance to the story, it felt very inorganic and pointless. There's also some scenes included that are literally 30 seconds that attempt to establish the world leaders but they are so brief that you don't care about them when some meet their inevitable demise during the terrorist attack. While on the subject of the terrorist attack, it seemed extremely impractical that a terrorist group would be able to infiltrate every level of Britain's law enforcement and manage to destroy literally every iconic London landmark, I'm not saying it's impossible as terrorism recently has managed to be much more widespread but I can only imagine these groups destroying one or two of these landmarks at most. That's a minor nitpick and this is a ridiculous action movie after all so many people can probably ignore some of these issues. One thing that's very hit or miss in the film are the visual effects, that can look very believable at times and in some moments obviously computerized. I think that's the result of the budget restrictions but I think that if a production team realizes their budget isn't large enough for a grand action sequences they should probably just nix it. Despite all of this, there are a few positive aspects. One being the action, it's just plain dumb fun action. Despite the impracticality, the action is all very entertaining and awesome to watch. The other pro being the cast, primarily the principal actors. Gerard Butler definitely is the glue that holds everything together. Butler returns as the everyman Secret Service Agent Mike Banning and really nails delivering the cheesy one-liners and is the charm of the film for sure. Aaron Eckhart also returns as President Benjamin Asher with much more charisma this time around. Eckhart gets to pal around with Butler and the two have great buddy-cop type chemistry onscreen. Morgan Freeman is back in the situation room again, this time as the Vice-President, and he's terrific but that can be expected. One downfall is that Alon Moni Aboutboul is such a blatant stereotype as the Middle Eastern villain scheming behind the scenes and isn't even in the film that often. So yes, the film has plenty problems but has some charm in it's action and performances. London Has Fallen aims to be bigger than it's predecessor and certainly is, but bigger doesn't always equal better. London Has Fallen is solid as a dumb action movie that would make a great rental, but beyond that isn't that great.
