London Has Fallen (2016)

Excellent adaptation.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This movie took not making any sense to a whole other level. I mean, you can almost rate it a sci fi movie.

Never before have I seen a terrorist movie where the terrorists outnumbers the entire police force+secret service of a whole city. This parallell universe of a story is so dumb and funny it's entertaining. Completely implausible that the POTUS would be left hiding all alone with his body guard and that the thousands of good guys would somehow be incapable of providing any security for hours and hours. But the stupidity only adds to the entertainment value. This is a movie you could watch with Donald Trump, Sean Hannity. a bag of potatoechips and some cheeseburgers. Good republican fun. It's nasty storytelling but it's better to address the problem in a juvenile way like this than to be forced to silence by the PC-police.

Sometimes what looks like a half-decent movie judging from actors, press material and so on, turns out to be just SHOCKINGLY bad. Add this to the list. What utterly provokes me to write this review is not so much the completely bland and predictable storytelling that looks like it could have been done by a 12-year-old. Neither is it the characters being as flat as pancakes, with every attempt to humanize them ending up being ridiculous (for instance some failed bro-mancy moments between the president and his guardian). It is not even the obvious stealing from other movies (there is for instance a line straight out of "The Matrix"), the bad CGI, or the bad acting (then again, what could they do with this s*** script?) - no, it is the blatant propaganda and racism at the core of the movie's mindset that both saddens and infuriates me. Had the main characters been North-Koreans fighting against the US, everybody would just laugh their asses off, because of how one-sided and stereotypical it is: Arabs are evil, Americans are civilized, end of story. Lena Riefenstahl would have been proud. Come on, is this view on the world productive in any way?

Maybe this stuff got Donald Trump elected. If Fox news was out to bring a movie, it would be something like this. Confirming stereotypes, unintelligent conversations, unrealistic action plots and shameless pumping nationalism.