‘London Has Fallen’ Review | With Great Glower Comes Great Irresponsibility

Gerard Butler has something that few actors have: presence. He strides into each frame with a burly glower and dares you to tell him he isn’t wearing pants. He growls his every line like a tiger defending his cubs. Gerard Butler is a movie star in a very classical way. You go into a Gerard Butler film just wanting him to preen before you and stab people in the chest, and in a film like London Has Fallen, that’s all you really need and all you’re really going to get. 

London Has Fallen is such an irresponsible motion picture that it borders on sublimity. The sequel to 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen, which was a perfectly functional Die Hard ripoff, arrives with a broader scope and a more unsettling agenda. A villain whose family died in a U.S. drone strike attacks a gathering of foreign leaders and kills every diplomat except the American president, forcing Butler’s Secret Service agent to save the day. That’s pretty much the whole film in a nutshell: London Has Fallen is the kind of movie that would assassinate every world leader in pornographic detail, just to make Americans feel better about themselves. To protect foreign countries, it’s up to these Americans to kill every non-American they can find.

Never mind that Gerard Butler is so Scottish that he drops the whole pretense halfway through the movie and finishes London Has Fallen with a full-tilt brogue. All that matters is that he has big speeches about defending America and fucking anyone who doesn’t like the way we conduct our foreign policy. The movie concludes with a different speech, read by a very respectable actor, who argues that the message of this motion picture we just watched is that America may not be perfect but it is still completely justified in killing everyone who scares us. London Has Fallen: it’s Team America: World Police but without the irony.

Gramercy Pictures

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So Gerard Butler gets to play the hero even while he interrogates his prisoners by impaling them repeatedly through the rib cage. It should be offensive, and in a vacuum it is, but the absolute ludicrous way that London Has Fallen allows itself to be told keeps our vitriol at a minimum. This is a childish battle cry made by people who just really wanted to watch Gerard Butler stab more people over the course of an evening than Jason Voorhees did throughout his entire career. 

And the whole movie is so full of plot holes and absurd ideas that criticizing them seems trivial: you wouldn’t tell a five-year-old that his action figure playtime is based on a faulty premise, and you wouldn’t tell the makers of London Has Fallen that in a crisis, everyone in a major metropolitan city wouldn’t politely stay inside. There should be people out there seeking aid and offering it, there should be looters and rabble-rousers. At the very least someone would probably be poking their head out the window once in a while, but instead the majority of London Has Fallen takes place on streets emptier than the ones in 28 Days Later.

London Has Fallen exists in a strange and awkward limbo where violence is always justified if an American does it (or at least, if a Scotsman playing an American does it). It’s so deliriously insipid that it’s impossible to take seriously, in large part because it takes itself so seriously. I kind of have to recommend it, not because it’s a good movie but because it’s an amazing carnival sideshow. All it does is spout jingoistic gibberish and show off its cartoonishly oversized testicles. If that’s all you paid money to see, then you will get a return on that investment.

William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.

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Top Photo: Gramercy Pictures