Talkie Tuesday: London Has Fallen

"Bullet-proof, not politician-proof!"

Hello everyone!

I'm finally fully back from vacation, this including not having a vacation mind anymore or being almost literally tied up with washing, drying, folding and cleaning in general. 

You know how things go when you've been away from home for a while.

So now that I'm back in business, it's time to pick up the slack after three weeks of virtually no posts from me and not even Tweets, with a movie recap and review! And of course, I wouldn't be me if I hadn't picked something that entertained me even before I went on my actual vacation, because honestly, there's nothing better than a good action movie.

Even if action is pretty much all you get in it.

But there you have it, I was a big fan, and still am, of Olympus Has Fallen, and so when a sequel was announced and the first trailer came out, I was stoked. When I finally got my hands on a copy, I truly was enthusiastic to see just what the screenwriters and creative minds behind it had cooked up.

I guess, though, that it's kind of difficult to follow the first film high if you're not James Bond.

The movie begins two years prior to the present moment when the US Intelligence has just gotten information that a terrorist, Bakawi, is at a compound attending a wedding, of all things, and they have a unique chance to take him out with a drone attack.

Of course, since this is PRE movie, you have to know things go south pretty fast, which will come to bite them later, but let's get to present day.

In which Mike, the agent we remember well from his dashing save in the White House years prior, is expecting his first child with his wife, typing up a resignation letter from the Secret Service, and still serving the President, as per usual, when news reaches America that the British Prime Minister has passed away.

This means there will be a large state funeral, and pretty much all the heads of the West will be there to represent. No show is not an option.

An annoyed Morgan Freeman, who remains the Vice President in this movie, returns early from holiday just so the President can fly across the Atlantic to London, where the rest of the lot are already gathering, MI6 on high alert with all the high rollers in town, and police on the move.

This does not, obviously, stop the terrorists from striking out, as they take out, one by one, every leader, or almost all the leaders, that came to attend the funeral.

My side note here is that I giggled like an idiot because the French representative, in a classic move, decided they would be fashionably late to the funeral itself. It's so typically French.

Mike's quick thinking saves the President, and they race back towards the choppers to get him out, only to be shot out of the sky in the process, and losing the President's Chief of Staff (at least I THINK that Lynne was his chief of staff) as the whole thing goes down.

Back in the US, the situation hits critical when they get a call from Bakawi, who did NOT die, obviously, but wants to make America pay for the family he's lost. So the hunt is on, as even the police is infiltrated in the UK, and Mike has virtually no one to turn to outside of one MI6 agent he still keeps in touch with.

Sadly, this isn't enough to keep the President from terrorist clutches, although before he can be publically executed on camera, Mike reemerges like a cat with a thousand lives and gets him the hell out of Dodge.

The movie wraps up with London reclaimed, the President safe and sound, Mike's daughter being named Lynne in honour of the deceased, and him deleting his resignation email.

Whew.

So up front, this was action, plain and simple, and not as subtle as with the Koreans back in the first movie, either, which took away from the movie a little bit, but I suppose following up really is hard. As it happens, however, that was why I enjoyed Olympus as much, and this one was a very poor addition to the family, if I do say so myself. Sure, it had the familiar faces and it had bombs going off, and hilarious dialogue because obviously, you have to have humour, but that was virtually it. I wouldn't recommend it as a movie to watch unless you really want something action-packed and pretty mindless, and while I can give it three out of five stars, I definitely won't be rewatching it any time soon, as opposed to its predecessor.

xx

*images and video not mine