Olympus Has Fallen - Movie Review

Starring Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Melissa Leo, Rick Yune, Dylan McDermott, Robert Forster, Radha Mitchell, Cole Hauser and Ashley Judd.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua.

★★3/4

Die Hard in the White House!

I actually saw a few people in my Twitter feed compare it to a Die Hard sequel (mostly favorably) before I went to the movie, so that was in my head.  And they're right.

Olympus Has Fallen is a straightforward action B-movie where one man has to take on a small army of terrorists who've taken over the White House, and they're holding the President, VP, Defense Secretary and a few other notables in the safehouse bunker underground.

One man, ex-Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Butler), makes his way into his former place of employment before the terrorists manage to lock it down.  Now he must kill off the stray guards that go looking for him as he searches for the President's son, unaccounted for and somewhere in the White House.

Meanwhile the head of the terrorist group (Rick Yune) sends demands to the Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman), acting president while POTUS and VPOTUS are hostages.

The whole thing takes place over the course of 24 hours, so a lot of it is at night, where fight scenes can hide more in their choreography. It amused me how often Mike and the other guy would have their guns knocked away so they'd fight with fists and kicks until one of them found a knife or something.

There were a couple plot points that were so stupid - and I mean so stupid! - that my brain had to actively fight and wrestle with them to not kill my enjoyment of the movie. If you tell me a failsafe, and I can instantly think about how to get around it and exploit it to kill millions, why did this potential exploitation never occur to anyone in the White House, Pentagon, contractors...?

Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) fills the supporting roles with plenty of champions.  I really liked how Melissa Leo (Academy-Award-winning actress...) threw herself into what could have been a throwaway role as the Secretary of Defense. (She was probably thinking, "I probably won't be in too many more action movies, so I'm going to have fun!")  You want the Speaker to be a man with gravitas? You don't mess around; you just get Morgan Freeman.

The body count is high, and the bullets fired are plentiful. Fuqua really doesn't mess around.

I can already see a sequel where Mike Banning is just visiting Buckingham Palace...

Dolphin Tale - Movie Review

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Starring Harry Connick Jr., Ashley Judd, Nathan Gamble, Morgan Freeman, Kris Kristofferson, Frances Sternhagen, Cozi Zuehlsdorff, Austin Stowell and Ray McKinnon. Directed by Charles Martin Smith.

The first question on many a mind might be, "What is Morgan Freeman doing here?" The answer is two-fold. 1.) He doesn't show up til the 65-minute mark, so it must've been decent pay for just a few days' work, and 2.) Have you seen how it's doing at the box-office? May have been pretty shrewd on his part.

This is the kind of pleasant for-kids cute-animal movie that could have just as easily been ABC's Disney Sunday Movie in 1988. A dolphin loses her tail but due to two kids who care and some kind adults, they figure out a way to make her a prosthetic tail.

Every moment is played broadly. The main kid, Nathan Gamble, has that shy hesitancy common in boys, but is it really so common before every single choice laid in front of him? I got tired of the delayed reaction to everything for comic effect. But the adults have that style too. Kris Kristofferson is the twinkly-eyed grandpa who exists solely to dispense one-liner wisdom. Harry Connick Jr. and Ashley Judd are individually single parents who might, might, have something blossom into a G-rated romance by the time this movie's done, and they have to have those exasperated pauses after everything.

Then there's this subplot about the kid's cousin going off to Iraq and coming back disabled. He doesn't lose his leg but we gather there's enough nerve damage there to where he'll never be able to fulfill his dream of swimming in the Olympics. And this wounded vet and the other wounded vets at the hospital are all rooting for this... dolphin... to accept her prosthetic tail. Just seemed grotesque to make a soldier's plight secondary to a dolphin's plight.

Now this is a harmless, inoffensive, heart-warming, blah-blah-blah family film. I got bored, even with Freeman there. They could have trimmed ten minutes easily by picking up the pace and needed to trim twenty overall. Its RotTom rating is 83%, so I know I'm in the minority.

When the dolphin dove right at the screen at the end, I remembered, "Oh yeah, they released this in 3-D too." Makes about as much sense as releasing Moneyball in 3-D.

Side note: This is the third time Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd have done a film together. They also starred in Kiss the Girls and High Crimes, both murder mysteries.