Angel Has Fallen (2019)
Directed by Ric Roman Waugh
Written by Robert Mark Kamen, Matt Cook, Ric Roman Waugh
Starring Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Piper Perabo
Release Date August 23rd, 2019
Published August 22nd, 2019
Angel Has Fallen stars Gerard Butler as Secret Service Agent, Mike Banning. Banning was the protagonist of Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen in recent years. In Angel Has Fallen we find a battered and bruised Banning suffering from post-concussion syndrome and relying on opioid to get by. Mike is hiding his condition from his wife (Piper Perabo) and even from his employer, President Trumbull (Morgan Freeman).
The only person aware of Mike’s issues is his closest friend, heretofore never mentioned in either previous movie despite also being a military and security expert whose tactical abilities might have come in handy in Mike’s previous adventures, Wade Jennings (Danny Huston). The two come together for beers and reminiscing and Mike confides that he is having some issues even as career-wise things are going well. Mike is soon to be named as the new head of the Secret Service.
The plot kicks in when Mike is guarding the President while he fishes on a private lake in Virginia. As Mike is taking a break to get more of his pills, the President’s security team is attacked by drones. All of the security team is killed except for Mike who also manages to rescue the President who is left in a coma from the attack. Mike is knocked unconscious and when he wakes up the next day he finds himself in handcuffs.
It seems that Mike’s fingerprints and DNA were found inside of a van from which the drones were launched. There is also the matter of some $10 million dollars traced back to Russia that has been found in an offshore account in Mike’s name. The FBI, led by Agent Thompson (Jada Pinkett Smith), is convinced that Mike is guilty of having orchestrated the attack on the President. He’s arrested and things get even weirder when Mike is busted out by a group of military trained mercenaries.
From there, Mike will escape the mercenaries and go on the run alone until he reaches the survivalist compound of his long absent father, Clay Banning (Nick Nolte), who gives him a place to hole up and regroup while the entire world searches for him. Mike has to figure out who set him up and how to prove to the good guys that he’s innocent so he can go after the bad guys and take them down while making sure the President is safe.
Where to begin with this idiotic plot. Angel Has Fallen is a singularly stupid movie. Most modern action movies are kind of brain dead but Angel Has Fallen takes brain death to a place of oxygen starved severity. Where movies like Fast and Furious Presents Hobbs and Shaw are dumb loud action movies that also happen to be fun, Angel Has Fallen is dumb, loud and unwatchably insipid. Angel Has Fallen lacks the charm to be fun and dumb. Instead, we are simply inundated with one dumb action scene after another in service of a deeply idiotic plot.
The dopey script, in order to get to the Mike Banning as The Fugitive plot they pre-ordained, has every other character in the movie turn into a complete moron. I was reminded of how the original movie, Olympus Has Fallen, in order to set out Mike as the greatest badass in history, turned the rest of the American military into fumbling doofuses who couldn’t shoot straight, a plot so offensive I was shocked that the movie found an audience among those who claim to support our military.
In Angel Has Fallen, it’s US intelligence that gets struck dumb in order to put over Mike as the one smart person in a sea of idiots. Poor Jada Pinkett Smith is forced to try and make this uniquely moronic plot work but in order to do that, she’s forced to act as the single most fog brained FBI agent in movie history. Only the most obvious clues are the ones that matter to her according to the plot and her single-minded, unquestioning, performance renders her witless.
That shouldn’t be too surprising as the movie has an equal amount of contempt for the audience. The plot of Angel Has Fallen could not be more predictable if they had handed out laminated copies of the script, color coded with notes about which characters are good and trustworthy and which ones are duplicitous baddies. If you can’t identify the two big villains of this movie within the first 5 minutes of the movie starting, you might want to check into a hospital to have your faculties checked.
Then, there is Gerard Butler, arguably the most charm-free and talentless of our modern action heroes. While some might seek to compare Butler to the Stallone’s and Schwarzenegger’s of the 80’s action genre, a better correlative would be Steven Seagal. Both are lunkheads with an arrogance that far surpasses their talent and a doughy, gormless quality to their appearance that betrays their over abundance of confidence.
Butler’s Banning, like every one of the characters Seagal played, is invincible, indestructible and due to some unspoken supernatural force, always capable of outsmarting people clearly smarter than they are. Butler, at the very least, hasn't tried to bring the ponytail back and is actually capable of running where Seagal's heroes were more stationary than your average couch, but the two share far more in common with their utter lack of genuine talent.
The screenwriters of the Fallen movies sacrifice the dignity and self-respect of every other character in these movies in their vain attempt to convince us that the sweaty, grunting, lummox that is Mike Banning, is the most cunning and crafty character on screen. It’s a failing effort from the start and that becomes an almost poignant source of campy laughs as these movies where on.
I genuinely began to feel sorry for Angel Has Fallen screenwriter Mark Robert Kamen as this movie wore on. Kamen's blood, sweat and tears must be all over these pages as he violates basic screenwriting ethics and general good taste just to try to make this one character remotely believable in the hands of this lunk headed star.
Angel Has Fallen is thus far the worst movie of 2019.
