LONDON HAS FALLEN

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND IDIOCY

Every so often there's one of those strange coincidences which throws up two similarly-themed movies around the same time (Volcano and Dante's Peak, Antz and A Bug's Life, Deep Impact and Armageddon): in 2013 we got two knuckle-headed action movies that were basically Die Hard In The White House. Neither White House Down nor Olympus Has Fallen were great films, but they were enjoyable enough: mindless popcorn spectaculars full of gung-ho flagwaving and big explosions with a not very well hidden Author's Message of Don't Mess With America.

In London Has Fallen, presidential bodyguard Gerard Butler doesn't so much wrap himself in the Stars And Stripes as tattoo it on his knuckles and challenge the rest of the world to come and have a go. No sooner have various world leaders gathered in London for the funeral of the British PM (including a randy Italian, cavorting with his lady friend atop Westminster Abbey) than terrorists show up with grenades and guns and rocket launchers and proceed to blow everyone and everything away. Butler manages to get the Prez out of the danger zone, but the arms dealer mastermind behind the carnage has special plans for him and has recruited legions of troops to capture him....

It's thoroughly terrible, and it's objectionable on numerous levels. Let's not bother too much with the female characters, because the film certainly doesn't: Radha Mitchell gets a bit at the start and finish as Butler's pregnant wife and Angela Bassett has a few scenes as his boss, while Charlotte Riley turns up over half way through as an MI5 agent who gets to take out the secondary villain. Let's be more concerned with the film's frankly ugly political stance which would make Chuck Norris look like a bit of a softie: Butler's declaration that "everyone is a terrorist scumbag until proven otherwise" might carry a bit more weight if he (or the film) actually gave any of them a chance to prove otherwise before emptying a handgun into them at first sight: he's not so much "shoot first, ask questions later" than "shoot first, move on".

Even as blokey, sweary, aggressively right-wing macho gun fantasies go, however, London Has Fallen is rubbish: maybe you could forgive, or at least ignore, the alarming politics and the sidelining of all the female characters if the movie was big dumb fun or at least competently strung together the way this sentence isn't. For a film that actively promises to kaboom most of London it's surprisingly lacking in spectacular money shots: we don't get to see Buck House, Big Ben or the Raymond Revuebar orgasmically reduced to digital cinders. And the destruction we do see is performed with CGI so unconvincing you suspect the FX crew from Sharknado have either lowered their game or they got a bulk deal on ZX Spectrums.

It's less of a meat-and-potatoes thudfest and more of a boiled-beef-and-carrots wet slap of a film, Compensation is very thin on the ground: there are big names in the cast (Jackie Earle Haley, Melissa Leo, Colin Salmon, Robert Forster) but they're given nothing to do; Morgan Freeman does his worthy, statesmanlike Morgan Freeman act again, and the naming of one second banana character does result in a pleasing (or terrifying) mention of "Prime Minister Clarkson" towards the end. None of it makes any sense on a narrative level, it's morally questionable to anyone outside of the EDL whackjob club (Butler swearily tells one goon, who he miraculously hasn't shot yet, to go back to wherever he came from), it has absolutely no sense of humour, and it's slung together with a lack of quality control bordering on audience contempt. Everyone involved should really sit down in a darkened room for a few hours and think seriously about what they've done.

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