Angel Has Fallen

Angel Has Fallen

Starring Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Danny Huston, Nick Nolte

Directed by Ric Roman Waugh

The Story:
Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) still serves as a member of the Secret Service, now protecting the new President, Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman).  The years have caught up with him, and he now suffers from migraines and insomnia, but he hides it so he can go for the job of the Secret Service Director.  While protecting the President on a fishing trip, they're attacked by a flock of drones that kill all the other protectors, puts Trumbull in a coma, and sets Banning up as the fall guy.

Banning is placed under arrest by FBI Agent Helen Thompson (Jada Pinkett Smith), but is broken free by the same men who framed him.  Banning escapes them and heads to visit his father Clay (Nick Nolte), who's become a recluse and finds himself far away from civilization.  As he pieces together who's framing him, Banning finds himself under attack not just by the terrorists, but by the government that he spent the majority of his life to defend.

The Synopsis:
The film trilogy "Olympus Has Fallen," "London Has Fallen," and "Angel Has Fallen" have two words that correlate to all three - "has" and "fallen."  Fittingly enough, as each sequel gets churned out, they live up to those two words: the franchise indeed has fallen to new lows, culminating in this very forgettable (but still action-packed) hopeful finale, a film that not even its stars wanted to do (Gerard Butler has expressed that he hopes this is the end, while Morgan Freeman's reasoning to do the film came down to one word - "money").

You can tell the life has been completely sucked out, as not even its action pieces are as inspired as they used to be, with terrible CGI effects and taking obvious cues from the master of explosions - Michael Bay - by having lots of people and things go "boom."  Mixed in is a "Bourne" series wannabe filming style of lots of close-up shots, jittering camera movements, and heroic poses in front of sunlight, along with a script that could've been written by a fifth grader who forgot he had to write a script for a movie and did it the night before.

Mike Banning is basically the epitome of American hero, a man who risked it all to protect the President not once, but twice, while pretty much every other person hired to protect him had either died or simply shown their own ineptitude.  So of course when the President comes under attack again, Mike is again the savior, but this time he's charged with trying to kill the President for reasons that any first-day local police force trainee could see was an obvious setup.

FBI agents in films are often portrayed as imbeciles, but "Angel" takes the cake for the stupidest group of FBI agents you've ever seen, led by the most incompetent and yet seemingly self-entitled agent who acts like she's on top of the ball but instead doesn't realize the ball is running her over.  She places Banning under arrest after pointing out all the clues that point to him as the mastermind for the assassination attempt (Banning's skin, fingerprints and hair fibers are found on the drone devices, some secret overseas bank accounts, hidden files on the dark web, basically everything that screams "we're framing Banning and the FBI will be too stupid to realize it"), and somehow only manages to make even dumber decisions as the film goes on.

Equally dumb is the script as a whole, as there's little to no room for any surprises, as the real bad guys are as evident as hoisting a neon sign above their heads saying "we're the bad guys," as you can tell from the casting who they are because they always play those characters.  Taking obvious license from films like "The Fugitive," we find Banning on the run from both the good and bad guys, and we already know how this will all turn out because we've seen this before.

Gerard Butler shows signs of aging not just in his character's new weakness of suffering from migraines (which seemingly go away when he comes under fire), but in his desire to be in this franchise anymore.  He simply floats through his performance, offering little to no effort, and the only really fantastic moments come when Butler's Manning reunites with his reclusive father Clay, played to insane perfection by Nick Nolte.  The two of them have a great chemistry and they really do fight like estranged father and son, while also providing the film's intentionally humorous moments.  Likewise, Morgan Freeman spends the majority of the film in a coma, much like how tiresome he's found the franchise to be.  When he does come to, he's just used as a rag doll carried around from place to place so as to not die, all the while seeming like he's welcoming of the experience.


The Summary:
More than just a story about a former hero who's seemingly fallen, "Angel Has Fallen" proves how much the franchise as a whole has fallen, resorting to a predictable, bland script and actors too tired to even be there anymore - but at least there's a decent amount of mind-numbing action.

The Score: C