A weather beaten Gerald Butler stars in Angel Has Fallen, the third film of the Fallen franchise after Olympus Has Fallen (2013) and London Has Fallen (2016). These action movies have to do with secret service agent Mike Banning (code named Angel), and all manner of threats to the President of the United States — played by Aaron Eckhart in the earlier two, and Morgan Freeman in the new one.
In Angel Has Fallen, Banning suffers from the after effects of old combat wounds — concussion, migraine, dizzy spells, pill addiction. He is told he is a disaster waiting to happen, but is still hesitant to accept the kick-upstairs desk job. There is another crazy plot to assassinate President Allan Trumball (Freeman), who trusts Banning implicitly with personal security, so the two men are out fishing when a drone attack is launched from the nearby woods. All the other security men are killed except Banning. He pulls Trumball under water to save him which has him end up in a hospital in a coma. Since Banning miraculously survived the attack — because the Russian bad guys wanted him to — he is accused of the crime by Vice President Kirby (Tim Blake Nelson). Of course, Banning has to go rogue, find the real villains and clear his name.
Apart from all the gun fights, car chases, hand-to-hand action and the usual mayhem wrought by action movies, this one tries to acquire something like a heart. It has Banning reunite with his estranged nutty Vietnam vet father Clay (an almost unrecognizable Nick Nolte), who lives like a hermit in a forest shack. Danny Huston ups the ante a bit as a mercenary.
The film’s action is functionally brutal, not as splashy as, say the Mission Impossible or Fast And Furious films, and Butler is no Bourne. The whole series has a sense of being a low rent action franchise that would please genre fans, but without a chance of turning into something memorable.
The plot is preposterous, humour is almost absent, and nobody seems to strain themselves more than absolutely necessary. Piper Perabo as Banning’s wife and Jana Pinkett-Smith as an FBI agent are token females in this kind of film that celebrates machismo.
