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75Korean-American actor and former model Yune (who played a similar role in "Die Another Day," the last Pierce Brosnan James Bond film) makes a colourful villain – handsome and insufferably assured, and also an unchivalrous sadist who kicks around the Secretary of Defense (Melissa Leo in a pageboy wig) as though she’s a hacky sack.
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75Although the film's real-world credibility is shaky, it works on its own terms.
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75It's that wonderful, totally unambitious yet satisfying thing, a really good movie.
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Mar 20, 201375While Olympus Has Fallen breaks no major new ground in the political thriller genre, Fuqua has directed a sharp, very taut adventure that keeps you engrossed from start to finish.
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67The action is the real star here, and it’s all good enough. It isn’t great – the aerial special effects are distractingly cheap – but at least there’s lots of it on display.
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67Melissa Leo has some standout scenes as the secretary of defense, who gets pretty well beaten up for defying her captors, but others, such as Angela Bassett and Morgan Freeman, have little to do but bite their lips and look tense from the confines of their command posts.
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63Any semblance of seriousness and verisimilitude suggested by the marketing campaign is quickly forgotten once director Antoine Fuqua's enjoyably tacky Die Hard-on-the-Potomac gets under way.
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Mar 19, 201363The film spends its first act establishing a flimsy emotional groundwork before gleefully taking a sledgehammer to it just seconds into act two.
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60The thrills and the effects are cheap, but this is in hard-driving, good-humoured command of its own silliness.
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60A deep supporting cast brings its A-game to the ridiculous dialogue.
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60Perhaps every generation gets the movie stars it deserves. “Olympus” has quite a bit to say about the current state of our country. Intentions aside, not all of it is entirely flattering.
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60Generates a fair amount of tension and produces the kind of nationalistic outrage that rock-ribbed Americans will feel in their guts.
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60A Red Dawn for the Tea Party era, Olympus Has Fallen is pretty ridiculously entertaining—or at least entertainingly ridiculous—for long stretches, dulled only by the realization that there are many parts of the country where this will play as less than total farce.
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50Olympus Has Fallen at least possesses the frisson of timeliness amid otherwise hoary action-movie cliches.
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50This unapologetic B-movie at least keeps the action rolling, and the time goes by quickly. To put it another way, I’d rather see Gerard Butler stab a terrorist in the neck than flirt with Katherine Heigl.
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50This is for those who like their political thrillers far-fetched, far-reaching and filled with pretty people.
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50A North Korean terrorist may be responsible for taking the president hostage, but it’s Bulgarian-made CGI that does the most damage in Antoine Fuqua’s intense, ugly, White-House-under-siege actioner Olympus Has Fallen.
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50For all the bursts of blood, the gunplay and execution-style head-shots that punctuate scores of deaths, it’s hard to see Olympus Has Fallen (Secret Service code) as much more than another movie manifestation of a first-person shooter video game.
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50Butler serves the cause well, considering. Think that cause is a thankless one? Shhh, don’t tell Secret Service agent Channing Tatum or president Jamie Foxx, headed your way in June with, yes, “White House Down.”
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50The countdown-to-Armageddon structure generates almost no tension, but Olympus Has Fallen does have lots of squalidly bloody hand-to-hand action, all of which is so pulpy and standardthat the film actually makes you grateful for the presence of Gerard Butler, gnashing his teeth in the Bruce Willis role.
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42The movie is so apolitical; there could have been a nice slant to the movie, about how both sides of the aisle could get together to kick out these Korean terrorists. Instead, it remains totally void.
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40Part of the weirdness of this film lies in the fact that the tense North Korean situation in the real world gives it no realism or satirical edge, or prophetic authority of any kind.
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40The movie isn’t a desecration, but it’s action filmmaking, not America, that needs to be reborn.
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40If you’re just going to rip off the action movies of yore, why not rip off more of the good stuff?
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35Feels from start to finish like a throwback to the action cinema and military thrillers of decades past.
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30Olympus Has Fallen is a disgusting piece of work, but it certainly hits its marks — it makes you sick with suspense.
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30Olympus Has Fallen is a disgusting piece of work, but it certainly hits its marks — it makes you sick with suspense.
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25Nearly everything that happens in Olympus Has Fallen is ludicrous, yet because the fate of the president and the nation hangs in the balance, the crisis is treated with the gravitas of Paul Scofield at the West End.
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20It may be too much to ask for anything more, but, on the other hand, if you’re going to go to the trouble of pretending to blow up the White House, you might also want to pretend that something was at stake.
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10[Antoine Fuqua] gives in to terrible instincts here, flirting with overwrought patriotism, one too many laugh lines amid numerous characters being shot in the head, and a general chaos-inspired editing technique all too rampant in today's action cinema.
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0Olympus Has Fallen is no fun at all. To the contrary, it soon grows tedious, odious and oppressive.