Given Butler's immediate return to auto-sneer and Pinkett Smith's relentlessly bland dialogue, this is nowhere near as much fun as it might sound. (In this series, that's actually a sign of progress.) Yet following that fateful fishing trip, with Banning framed for the plot to assassinate the president, Waugh's thriller quickly turns into a sub-moronic take on The Fugitive, with Butler – no longer showing any signs of internal or external weakness – in the Harrison Ford role and Jada Pinkett Smith as Tommy Lee Jones. While the Russians prove to be the ultimate bad guys, their nasty dealings take place entirely off-screen, with the sky-high pile of corpses here composed merely of Americans employed by the Russians. To be fair, Angel is far less xenophobic and grossly 'Murica First than the Olympus and London entries. That, however, was where the movie's opening 20 minutes ended, and from there on out, nearly everything I detested about the previous Mike Banning flicks came back in full force. The drones' approach from afar is giddily effective (“Are those bats?”), and despite the somewhat cheesy CGI effects, the explosive repercussions of the onslaught – with all but Banning and the prez killed – are so implausibly yet enjoyably over-the-top that my jaw practically dropped … and not, for once, because of how ludicrous this particular Has Fallen release was proving to be. president (Morgan Freeman), Banning, and roughly two dozen fellow agents attacked by a swarm of artillery-laden drones during a fishing trip. (There's also another, just-as-predictable mole lurking amidst Angel Has Fallen's White House staff, but I'll keep his identity secret for those two or three viewers who might not instantly surmise it.) Regardless, Waugh's film ambles along adequately enough up to and including its first major action set piece, which finds the U.S. This, by the way, is the complete opposite of a Spoiler given that said best friend is played by Danny Huston, a character actor who oozes such malevolence, and who has been cast as devious turncoats so many times before, that his latest offering doesn't even bother to treat Huston's treachery as a surprise. But Angel Has Fallen's view of Mike Banning – and, by extension, Gerard Butler himself – as fallible is supremely refreshing, as are the early scenes of the agent enjoying domestic tranquility with his wife (the lovely, much-missed Piper Perabo), infant daughter, and best friend of many decades, the latter of whom winds up being the movie's chief villain. It's hardly the last 10 minutes of Captain Phillips. Before long, though, we also see him seized by migraines and popping pain pills, with a doctor's visit revealing that our theoretically indestructible agent is both an exterior and interior wreck, likely due to the spine-cracking abuse endured in his previous world-saving adventures. Yet it turns out that when he's not playing God's Gift to Us All – which is what Butler's presence suggests in about 95 percent of his movie roles – he's not altogether bad, and Waugh's follow-up has the good sense, at least at the start, to make Mike Banning recognizably human.Īn introductory, bait-and-switch action sequence effectively establishes Banning's bad-ass bona fides. Given the Scottish performer's one-note grimness, unmissable self-regard, and distractingly mush-mouthed attempts at American accents, I generally spend the majority of Butler's screen time staring helplessly at my auditoriums' exit signs. For a full 20 minutes.Īs I'm tired of repeating (and you're perhaps tired of reading), Butler is the film star whose appearances I dread more than anyone else's. And blessedly, Angels Has Fallen is indeed less noxious than its predecessors. Considering those were two of the more painfully awful studio releases I've suffered through this decade, director Ric Roman Waugh's second sequel, I presumed, had nowhere to go but up. In the new action thriller Angel Has Fallen, Gerard Butler plays Secret Service agent Mike Banning for the third time, having already portrayed this gruff, dyspeptic, über-violent patriot in 2013's Olympus Has Fallen and 2016's London Has Fallen.
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