London Has Fallen

Just when you thought that the summer high adrenaline, action flicks hadn't started yet, the film "London Has Fallen" is released. You know this one. This is the successor sequel to 2013's "Olympus Has Fallen" with a lot of the same cast. As with the majority of sequels being lackluster to their predecessors, this is certainly as good as the first installment. Not that the first film was fantastic by any stretch of the imagination, this was still one that certainly held the audience's attention.

After the British Prime Minister has passed away under mysterious circumstances, all leaders of the Western world must attend his funeral. But what starts out as the most protected event on earth, turns into a deadly plot to kill the world's most powerful leaders and unleash a terrifying vision of the future. the President of the United States, Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart), his formidable secret service head Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), his secret service director, Lynne Jacobs (Angela Bassett) and a MI6 agent, Jacqueline Marshall (Charlotte Riley), who trusts no one, are seemingly the only people that have any hope of stopping it.
The film starts out with a covert operation attacking a terrorist compound, but inadvertently killing innocent family members of this compound--being collateral damage, and the leader, Aamir Barkawi (Alon Moni Aboutboul) is bent on exacting revenge on the President of the United States for his actions. And what a better place to pull this off than setting up a scheme in London where all will be there, especially the president. This happens two years later.

Others to round out the cast are Morgan Freeman as VP Alan Trumbull, Robert Forster as General Edward Clegg, Jackie Earle Haley as DC Mason, Melissa Leo as Defense Secretary Ruth McMillan, Radha Mitchell as Leah Banning, Mike's wife, Sean O'Bryan as NSA Ray Monroe, Waleed F. Zuaiter as Kamran Barkawi and Colin Salmon as Chief Hazard.

This was adequately directed by Babak Najafi ("Seebe" '10, "Easy Money: Hard to Kill" '12) plus TV and Shorts. This filmmaker doesn't have a ton of feature film experience, but a film like this one is certainly familiar territory to him. Interesting that Antoine Fuqua didn't reprise his position as director, but he was probably committed to another project at the time, not to mention that this director had to be exceedingly less expensive to hire since Fuqua has quite the name in the directing realm by now. It was written by Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt, Christian Gudegast and Chad St. John, based on a story by Rothenberger and Benedikt, which is based on characters created by Rothenberger and Benedikt. OK, did you get all that? Surprisingly, this wasn't badly written, especially considering the plethora of writers involved. The fact that this was written by two of the four writers who created these characters helped in this being as well executed as it was, but there were still a few places of choppiness and inconsistencies. Otherwise this was certainly a better script than usual considering the genre and the fact there were four, yes four writers involved. The par is if there are more than two writers, the storyline can easily become convoluted, but this, although needed some polish, was snappy and definitely kept the audience's attention.

Crime, action, thriller. All great elements of a high adrenaline, high explosive, big-budget film. If this is what you want, this will certainly fit the bill. Hey, if one has seen the trailer on this, and how could you miss it, one would have to know what they're walking into. This is big action at its finest, and isn't this enough for an action-packed slice of escapism?

Out of 4 Stars: 3                                      Rated: R                                   99mins.