OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (15, 120 mins)

Director: Antoine Fuqua

3 stars

 

Olympus Has Fallen has been a roaring success at the US box office these past few weeks, where other violent action films with established stars like Stallone and Schwarzenegger have failed miserably this year.

Quite why that's the case is hard to pin down, because this "Die Hard in the White House" movie, the first of two coming at us this year (Channing Tatum's White House Down arrives in a few months) isn't exactly original, nor is it necessarily any better than recent fare.

But it somehow seems fresher, less rooted in the 80s, and a more relevant star in Gerard Butler helps. Perhaps it just gives audiences what they crave in action terms.

After a few years toiling in woeful rom-coms, Butler has rediscovered what he's good at, playing Mike Banning, a Secret Service agent heading the team protecting the President (Aaron Eckhart).

A car accident on wintry roads on the way to an event leads to the death of the First Lady, and 18 months later, Banning has been given a minor detail away from the President.

But when the White House is attacked and occupied by North Korean terrorists and the president held hostage, only Banning stands between them and, well, whatever it is that they want. Something bad anyway, to do with nuclear codes.

The comparison to Die Hard is unavoidable, not just in its setup of one man, alone on the inside, facing off against massive hordes of goons, but in the brazen way it actually explicitly references (rips off) scenes and ideas.

But Die Hard remains, a quarter of a century after its release, probably the greatest action movie ever made, so it's no surprise to learn that Olympus Has Fallen is barely playing the same sport, never mind in the same league.

Logic problems dog it throughout, and there's never a proper sense of geography or purpose about what Banning is doing.

For the first hour or more of his escapades, he's simply coming up against a succession of baddies in darkened rooms and beating them mercilessly. Eckhart is largely wasted, spending most of the film tied up to a railing while the villains snarl at him, and a betrayal that could have been interesting is brushed aside with minimum fuss.

And the visual effects are surprisingly poor. The initial attack on the White House features a lot of planes, crashes and carnage, and there's never a moment where it looks anything other than computer generated.

Yet for all its flaws, there's something undeniably satisfying about the thing that really makes Olympus Has Fallen tick, and that's watching the good guys save the day.

It's the same sort of primal gratification that made the first Taken film so enjoyable, the righteous hero hammering seven bells out of the baddies, and the audience lapping it up.

It's astonishingly violent though, perhaps needlessly so in places, but constructed with undeniable skill. It is cheesy, jingoistic and unpleasant, yet often enormous fun at the same time. Like its hero, it gets the job done.

See it if you liked: Die Hard, In the Line of Fire, Air Force One

EVIL DEAD (18, 91 mins)

Director: Fede Alvarez

1 star

 

Remember in Friends whenever Joey was in some dreadful production or other, the rest of the group would argue over who got to praise the lighting?

It's worth keeping that straw-clutching tactic in mind should you ever find yourself cornered by the makers of this woeful, yet beautifully lit, horror remake.

That's about as fulsome as the praise can get, although the practical mak-up effects are also excellent, even if they're only used to provide one nasty sequence after another.

In a post-Cabin in the Woods landscape, can we simply accept the set-up of a group of kids in, well, a cabin in the woods?

On this evidence, not so much is the answer, even with the spin of one of their number there to detox. So director and co-writer Fede Alvarez ramps up the savagery instead, trying to generate horror through pain instead of having unsettling things happen to people we actually care about.

The discovery of a book of spells leads, through the actions of moronic characters whom we don't care about for a second, to incantations and summonings, followed by the same pattern of demonic attack over and over again, shorn of wit or subtext.

There's plenty suffering and ferocity but never any real fear, so we get overblown sound and torrents of blood as if that's all you need for good horror, and it soon becomes sinfully dull.

If you go down to the woods today, you're liable to be bored stiff.

See it if you liked: The Evil Dead, The Cabin in the Woods, Texas Chainsaw 3D

REBELLION (15, 135 mins)

Director: Mathieu Kassovitz

4 stars

 

The translation of the original French title of this fine war drama is Order and Morality, a clue to the deeper thematic ambition at play in a film that finds real power in the humanising of its perceived enemies.

It's an account of the 1988 rebel attack on the French Pacific colony of New Caledonia, when Kanak separatists killed members of the Gendarmerie stationed on the islands, and took others hostage.

Director Mathieu Kassovitz also co-writes and stars as the soldier sent in to negotiate their release, with the fact that it's all taking place on the eve of the French presidential election adding a tension between military practicality and political manoeuvring.

In many ways Rebellion is like a Vietnam movie, with its tropical setting and fighting against guerrilla forces, while providing insight into colonialism and imperialism alongside muscular, well orchestrated action.

Overlength is an issue, with a good 45 minutes of back and forth in the middle that could have been concluded in half the time, but this is still powerful and compelling stuff.

LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED (15, 116 mins)

Director: Susanne Bier

3 stars

 

A young couple head to Italy for their wedding in this pleasantly throwaway romantic drama from Denmark.

Pierce Brosnan is the father of the groom, meeting the mother of the bride for the first time, Ida (Trine Dyrholm), who is recovering from chemotherapy treatment and a cheating husband.

As they all gather at a villa for a few days of preparation and family squabbles that deviate little from just how you might expect them to go, it trundles on in watchable enough fashion.

Though breezily amusing in places, some clunky lines and predictability are its biggest enemies, but they're a well put together bunch of characters, especially Ida, and Dyrholm is tremendous at the heart of it as a woman trying to remake her life.