Die Hard.... in the White House! Air Force One... meets Under Siege! The plot for Olympus Has Fallen is an easy sell, but unfortunately director Antoine Fuqua doesn't have enough conviction to fully believe in this High-In-Fun, Low-In-IQ pitch, watering down the enjoyment with unending American patriotism and unnecessary scenes of pseudo Father/Son bonding.
Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is a government agent who has been fired from the Secret Service after an accident resulting in the First Lady’s death. Current hot topic/go-to cinema villains North Korea are making a lot of noise again, and during a meeting with some South Korean politicians, the White House gets attacked and taken over by North Korean terrorists, with President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) taken hostage. So Banning takes it upon himself to save the day, the president, the whole damned world.
Despite some Commodore 64-era CGI, the opening attack on the White House is a fantastically executed action sequence, with enough explosions to satisfy the junkiest of action junkies. The rest of the movie's action scenes fail to live up to this early promise however, with most of the fights confined to Butler and a North Korean or two kicking the snot out of each other in a smoky, darkened hallway.
On the one hand, the script for Olympus Has Fallen is god-awful. Rushed into production to beat the similarly themed White House Down to cinemas, and it's a pity more time wasn't spent in improving the dialogue. A lot of big name actors – Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd, Dylan McDermott, Melissa Leo, Radha Mitchell, Angela Bassett, Cole Hauser – are painfully underwritten, while Butler's comedic banter subsists of him saying 'Fuck' a lot. However, the movie does go to some darker places that most action flicks wouldn't dare. The bad guys perform some taboo-breaking villainy; a bullet-strewn American flag here, an old woman kicked to the stomach there, they even (GASP!) kill a dog! But Butler's 'good guy' isn't much better, as he rocks around stabbing endless people in the brain.
So what we have here is a 5-star fantastically cheesy explosion-fest and a 1-star unforgivably idiotic mess happening simultaneously. How much you enjoy may depend entirely on how much alcohol you've got in your system at the time.