In the movie, Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) works as a Secret Service Agent and has experienced an amount of action, which most superheroes will witness in their lifetime and more, but Angel Has Fallen brings the tough warrior against a new danger posed by the very person he is protecting: the president. In the second sequel to the movie Olympus has Fallen which was released in 2013, he is suffering from a mild case of pain killer dependency chronicled in the base of a few concussions accuser throughout his career and hides these plight from his wife Leah (Piper Perabo, replacing Radha Mitchell) and President Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) and Secret Service Director David Gentry (Lance Reddick).
From the very beginning we meet an old friend of Banning’s from the Army, his name is Wade Jennings (Danny Huston). Clearly today Jennings runs his own company, providing high-caliber Private Security. Because of this association, we are presented with the focus that Angel Has Fallen is trying to work on, ‘Is it possible to change the role for “lions” of the actions, Banning and Jennings, who would rather be out in the field (while still able to) than be a dull paper pusher behind a desk?’ At what point do we reach the thresholds of pain or injury or other consequences that one is prepared to embrace in a career as this? This Is Why Major’s scale attempts to improvise the film with mixed results.
A predictable plot point of the Fallen series saw yet another president former Vice President Trumbull currently serving as Commander in Chief with support from new vice president Kirby played by Tim Blake Nelson only to become target resurfaces. The president himself suffers an attempted assassination that results in only three of his advisers surviving comatose Banning one of his advisors. One such reason simply clumsily unfolds during the first act of the movie is that FBI Special Agent Helen Thompson played by Jada Pickett Smith who should have been altamente bossted fully places her focus on Banning as suspect number one and the chase is thus commenced.
The picture moves further in this particular ‘The Fugitive’ vein as the hunt-a-terrorist concept is discarded and finally leads us into a Raid-lite storm of bullets and squibs, all in about 30 seconds into the thunder of the storyline.
Angel does have some easy to get rid of fun concept set pieces which have unfortunately narcissistically fast cut editing and unnecessary over the top lighting which’s more probably used to save some slow choreography than to enhance the action. Still, a storming truck chase though subterrane woodland characters’ rather groan and pluck than dirt without sacrifice of carven realism in contrast to the fetish of faceless terrorists capturing and pillaging modern-day Washington and London.
As soon as the bombs and bullets start flying, the film seems to be at its most brilliant, as opposed to those – no doubt well thought out – attempts at hand-to-hand combats that it does from time to time. It’s breathtaking how a guns akimbo fight-induced sequence could contain a solid grasp of spatial awareness and timing but gets lost in the crowd during scenes of tussles on the roof between the protagonist and the antagonist. The same goes for a few sequences early on in which Banning takes down some baddies with his bare knuckles; these ought to be very interesting, and demonstrate the strength of our hero-in diplomacy, but are lost somewhere in the mass of rapidly cut images of angry faces.
However, Angel Has Fallen is more convincing because it tries to strike a fair middle ground between the extreme wishesatisfied violence of Olympus and the unwarranted sense of exaggeration of London Has Fallen, encompassing some refreshing concepts of self-sacrifice and underappreciation by the motherland. For this reason, we view Banning’s relationship with his father in a sympathetic context, dictated rule number one of the war: never take anything personally, as portrayed by Clay Egan.
Most importantly, there is strained relationship in the Banning boys which is that of Mike’s sense of responsibility and Clay’s belief of the government wanting everything from you but giving you little in return. This relationship is the most interesting one in the film and it also helps populate better Mike’s wish to see a father figure in Trumbull. It contains the seeds of an enquiry of masculinity, nation, and PTSD which could have turned out to be Angel; if it had such ambitions, into a more serious-level work, yet it chooses to complacently return to the comforting No Guts, No Glory paradigm this franchise has put forth from day one. Rather than aiming for the nuanced and critical approach, Angel opts for a several well performed dog fight sequences between Butler and Nolte before presenting a reasonable opportunity for a return to the proper narrative.
In those situations, she argues the familiar angles and, anyway, some shocking twists that we (and you more probably) have seen many, many times over in the same or similar format films, including the Fallen moves themselves. If you watched the other parts of the series about once or twice and watched the trailer to Angel, it is not a hard task to recreate the storyline of this paint by numbers action scandal.
However, Butlers Banning is also an Immortal, black and white television show hero with true to life challenges (addiction to and pain management are as easy to relate to as the protecting the president part of the character). The character is certainly not one that will go down in the case studies of action heroes library of fame, however Butler still goes-ahead to excuse himself in portraying the role seeking for balance between the killer provisions of his being and the human virtue and respect he seeks to be.
The Verdict
Despite the fact that Angel Has Fallen bears a copy of the narrative and character arc of Olympus Has Fallen, it, however, does not live up to the fun filled, glamour and excessive exaggerated action plot of the highest stakes possible entertainment of Olympus. Yet, this feels more like a hiatus than a retreat because this world deserves a bit of investigation before the audience takes a plunge. Actions are an afterthought and aggressively mundane after John Wick but this one proves to have more than a few out of the box action beats. The structural weaknesses in action narrative may be forgiven had the film gone deeply in exploring the intended themes, but, as it is, the film settles for being one of those bland action films where the performances of the main cast do much to push the film over the edge.
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