For a moment, I misread the title and thought that one of America's best-loved character actors was in desperate trouble: Olympia Dukakis was lying at the bottom of her stairs, pressing frantically at her personal alarm and the rapid-response operative at the end of the line had wrenched off his headset phone and reduced the call centre to stunned silence by intoning: "Olympia has fallen. And she can't get up."
It's actually worse than that. "Olympus" turns out to be US secret service code for the White House, and this is a no-stereotypes-barred, red-scare disaster movie of the sort Jerry "Airplane!" Zucker might write after a head injury. You could well wish that the title held out a crumb of hope by being Olympus Is Fallin'. But it is in the past tense. The unthinkable worst has already happened.
The film is about an attack on the presidential home by a bunch of loathsome North Korean terrorists who circumvent security with worrying ease. But they prove to be vulnerable to counterattack from one guy, just one guy, armed with nothing but guns, guts, patriotism and a pair of cojones the size of Saturn's moons.
Antoine Fuqua directs, Aaron Eckhart plays the president, and Ashley Judd is his adoring wife. While the first family is being ferried away from Camp David one night in heavy snow, the president's stretch limo blows a tyre and teeters terrifyingly over a bridge with only the VIPs in the back keeping it from toppling over. What they needed was a young Michael Caine to show up and say he's got a great idea. Sadly, what they got was the president's secret service bodyguard and total best bud Mike Banning, played by Gerard Butler, who makes a fateful, split-second decision.
Trusty Mike bears the mental scars of that night, but some time later, and with the air of a man taking the lemon fate has handed him and grinding it into the juicer, he converts his pain into purpose: a determination to redouble his efforts to protect the chief and to redeem himself. And when the appalling North Koreans bust into the White House – having indulged in a little sub-9/11 vandalism in that plane of theirs – Mike sees his chance.
Part of the weirdness of this film lies in the fact that the tense North Korean situation in the real world gives it no realism or satirical edge, or prophetic authority of any kind. Just as the stopped clock is correct twice a day, so the Hollywood screenwriter trying to find a non-Islamic bad guy might occasionally stumble into the middle of the nightly news. The president in this fiction is white, but Fuqua's film clearly alludes to the ethnicity of the actual president by casting Morgan Freeman as the House speaker and wise old owl who must make executive decisions while the C-in-C and his VP are tied up and held hostage. "You are the acting president of the United States," someone says solemnly to Freeman. "That's fine, because I have already played Nelson Mandela," is what Freeman should have replied in his quavery nasal baritone.
• From Film&Music: Aaron Eckhart interviewed about his role in the film
• From The Guide: John Patterson gives his take
And when he reassuringly addresses America in an emergency TV broadcast, he really does sound like Leslie Nielsen at the controls of his airplane, making a calming announcement to the passengers. But all the time, feisty hero Banning is creeping along the wrecked corridors of the White House, in contact with the good guys via a secure-line mobile phone. He is a one-man rescue squad, occasionally pausing to torture the bejeepers out of some North Korean goons for valuable intel – like a cross between Bruce Willis in Die Hard and Kiefer Sutherland in 24. But he also manages to bestow redemption on a certain acquaintance.
The real laughs, however, are in the Pentagon crisis room, where Robert Forster plays the grizzled, frowning general who strides in and demands of his aghast subordinates: "How bad is it?" Pretty bad, if they've wheeled out Forster to play the general.
As it happens, the film does not dwell on the pettifogging distinctions between North and South Korea, although it suggests that the South Korean state itself is a worrying Trojian horse for evildoers. The terrorists may not, in fact, have the authority of the powers-that-be in Pyongyang – a nice diplomatic touch. But their demands are plain enough: pull out your troops from the demilitarised zone in the Korean peninsula, or the prez gets it, which makes the final plot turn baffling. In a movie such as Independence Day, the bad guys came from another planet, and that was fun, but Olympus Has Fallen is an unfortunate descent.
