Olympus Has Fallen

What a fantastic film - gripping, exciting and tense from start to finish!! A group of North Korean terrorists nonchalantly shoot down a squadron of American fighter aircraft and then calmly launch a ground attack on the White House, occupy it, and take the President hostage. Yawn, yawn you might think - been here before? Could be a tedious way to spend a Bank Holiday afternoon?

There's nothing wrong with an action adventure film done the right way - Die Hard does it with a touch of humour, overkill and tongue firmly in cheek - Skyfall and the best James Bond films do it with a certain sense of style. There was not much humour in Olympus - and not much style either - instead, it took its lead from the classic TV serial "24", in having you biting your fingernails and sitting on the edge of your seat with the sheer tension of what was going on - a single little slip up against massive odds and we could have nuclear meltdown. Of course, the scenario was a little incredible and it’s far fetched in the extreme to think that terrorists could get close to what they did here - but far fetched or not, the film made it all look utterly realistic and convincing. The hero, Mike Banning is surely Jack Bauer in disguise - I'm a little sad that this wasn't made into a "24" film, but then again Jack Bauer has already saved the White House once when it had been taken by terrorists, so this would have been "same old, same old" for him, I suppose. The tension never let up, and when Mike Banning had thirty seconds to input the deactivation code for Cerberus to stop the nuclear meltdown, for all the world it felt like me at work, trying to put my password in the computer in the morning.

There's nothing new under the sun, and everything in this film has been done numerous times before in different guises -but boy, there's a way of doing this type of film, and for sheer white knuckle tension, this film really does take some beating.

27.05.13