j* Movie Reviews 2019

Angel Has Fallen (2019)

This one has all the intensity, if not more, of the previous Fallens, plus bonus Old Man of the woods.

It bugs me that I don't have reviews of Olympus Has Fallen (2013) or London Has Fallen (2016) because people seem very divided over whether Angel Has Fallen is the best of the three or the worst. So without re-watching them, I'm probably in the camp of best of the three. You don't really need to see the other two to go into this one, but it will give you more context to the relationship between the President (Morgan Freeman) and Banning (Gerard Butler). But if you just commit to understanding that Banning saves the day and the President, come hell or high-water or drones or bombs or grenades or knives or ninjas or helicopter guns or exploding cars or double agents or trained assassin cockatoos, well you'll basically get the premise.

This is a super extreme bodyguard movie.

It's kinda cool, in this day of moving towards genius collaborative teams both on tv and film, to see a franchise still holding the fort on "the lone legend." It's especially interesting given they let the lone legend triumph so readily in the face of such modern attacks. I mean they do give you hints from time to time, little glimmers of the rest of the team scrambling in the background to make everything a bit clearer, but this is a one man show.

The action in this one is big, bombastic and then tight and gritty both. There are all the nasty physical altercations, the psychological games. What I particularly like is that there are little bits of mystery, "who is the baddy" but they never let this be secret for too long, preferring to set it up just a little then slide it out in the open so more showdowns can occur. Because this film isn't about uncovering mystery, it's about blowing away the enemy and defending the Morgan Freeman with your life.

I find it interesting in that I'd possibly describe this as a "modern war film" where the threats aren't easily identified, and can lurk around every corner in the urban landscape. It's almost part heist, part war. Things are always on the go, and always dangerous.

Probably the best thing about this one is Banning's Dad, Clay (Nick Nolte). He plays the even more messed up Vietnam Vet to Mike Banning's Iraq War Vet. And Gramps might have been a hermit hiding in various woods for the last fifty years or so, but boy howdy does he know how to hold a fort. Honestly, the sequence of explosions Clay sets off are some of the funniest things I've ever seen. The relationship between the two of them, Mike as the ageing war dog wondering if he should give it up, and Clay as the even more aged war dog refusing to give anything up is pretty spectacular. So there's a real Dad-Son buddy angle to this film that brings a lot more comedy than the previous films. In particularly, the partial end-credit scene... personally I thought that would have been genius as a proper end-credit scene, because the film does feel like it has a few too many endings as it is.

Anyway, I was pretty entertained throughout.

J* gives it 4 stars.