Now I have to be honest with you, for a quick second there I did kind of mix and match certain characters from White House Down (Jamie Foxx) and Olympus (Aaron Eckhart) but once visions of Gerard Butler knifing people in the head popped back up into my brain, all of the freshness suddenly returned. Olympus did have a ridiculous plot and quite a few of the lines were unbelievably cheesy but all of the fresh shit talking and brutal violence supplied by Butler more than made up for it. Plus there was a weird sense of American pride floating throughout the theater as we watched our hero help take back the White House and in essence our country from the evil terrorists!
Man that really made me sound like a radical Conservative, didn’t it? But in this case it was actually true! I hadn’t felt anything like that since Rocky 4 when Rocky went into Russia and he ended the Cold War with just a few quick jabs to the jaw of an evil Russian in a boxing ring. Well that’s all that London is, it’s a throwback to 80’s action films where you have a one man killing machine who can go into a building that’s full of a hundred terrorists, save the damsel in distress, blow up the entire building with them in it, and come out of it barely singed. And if we were all being honest with ourselves, part of us really missed these wonderful movies.
Well in London, the president (Eckhart), along with the rest of the world’s leaders, all descend upon London on short notice after the death of the British Prime Minister. And as you can imagine, it’s a security nightmare as you have 40 different security teams all utilizing their own procedures to help protect their assets. But it’s a state department funeral so it reflects poorly on your country if your leader decides that he’s not able to attend, regardless of the circumstances.
Well on the day of the funeral, everything appears to be going according to plan until a car holding one of the attendees goes up in flames. This sets off a chain of events that kills quite a few of the world’s leaders and in the process destroys or damages pretty much every building of significance in London. After the dust has settled, so to speak, and Butler has at the time saved the President’s life, an illegal arms dealer lets the US government know that he plans to continue killing people until they hand the President over to him for public execution. So the race is on to get Eckhart to safety before he is found and killed for all the world to see.
Once again writers supply us with cheesy lines and an even more ridiculous plot as pretty much everyone in London appears to be in on the assassination attempt. But Butler, just as he did in the first one, is here to save the day. There’s not nearly as many knifings or trash talking in this one as there was in the first but the quality of the action has been taken up a notch or two in London. There’s a ton of explosions, car chases, and crazy helicopter crashes to appease even the most hardcore of action fans. And the director utilizes a cool first person filming sequence to follow Butler around as he jumps from exploding room to exploding room in the film’s climax.
Is this movie Oscar worthy? No but it’s certainly worth a quick pop in if you like action. I rate this movie as FRESH!
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