Here are a series of weird things about my experience of watching Olympus Has Fallen that have nothing to do with the actual movie.
- I thought I had already seen it. I did the thing I do now and then where I decide, I’ve seen enough Shudder movies in a row, what’s on my Netflix queue? And the oldest thing on that queue was London Has Fallen, which is what I thought I would be watching, until I realized, huh, never saw the first one.
- But so then I found it was on NBC/USA, but not on Peacock, which is stupid. Which made me nervous that it would be edited, but nope, not edited, tons of adult language and violence. And yet, with commercial breaks edited in. Does that mean if you’re watching cable on the actual USA channel, they just air it uncut now?
- When I say commercial breaks edited in, I mean there are fadeouts / fadeins that clearly were not part of the movie in the theater. Which stood out to me because they did not line up with the streaming commercial breaks in any way. How is it possible that we’ve reached a place where commercials are worse than they were in my youth? How is this possible?
Anyway. There’s this secret service guy not on active duty because of reasons that are explored in the first act, but he happens to be looking out his window when the White House is attacked by terrorists and/or foreign powers. So he runs down the street and crashes the party, John McClane style, and before you know it he’s the only good guy in a completely captured government facility.
Pretty much everything else happens the way you’d expect, it’s an action movie after all. I liked it well enough to be a movie, but I am skeptical that there’s enough here to support a trilogy, you know? We’ll see, someday!