With blockbuster billing and a cast to match, the prospects for “London Has Fallen” looked promising, but why was the result a fatally flawed farfetched fable and where did both the cinematography & continuing crash & burn condemning this supposedly superb screenplay to the scrapheap
We cannot deny being drawn in by disaster movies from time to time, we having to shamefully admit that ones in our DVD collection include “Armageddon”, “Dante’s Peak” & “Deep Impact”, all resoundingly sitting on our second rate shelf, while another, “Independence Day” rarely gets a dust off despite news that it is soon to benefit from a make-over, the only saviour of all these flaw filled films being that wonderful word, escapism. Yet while the very nature of our cinema going these days is to do just that, escape from the real world for a while, there is a limit to how far we will push it, the “Marvel” series of movies an example of the type that we avoid, while the fabled fantasising that the types of films follow fails to ignite that much interest in us. That said, one offering that has been trailing of late has been “London Has Fallen”, an a-typical disaster deliverance that definitely drew us in, the cleverly compiled teaser highlighting London landmarks under attack that had a bizarrely beguiling attraction, the plot surrounding a terrorist invasion of this capital city as the world’s leaders descended on London for the supposed state funeral of the British prime Minister, all being caught in a masterminded trap by a band of arms dealers seeking revenge for a drone decimation of their compound. With the focus on the US President & his minder (played by Gerard Butler), this disaster come action thriller takes you on a farfetched and unrealistic journey through the streets of the capital as Butler tries to save the city & his president from these fanatics.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AsOdX7NcJs[/youtube]
So with the spoil proof sketchy plot set out, what did we actually think of this film? Well, had we relied on our instincts we wouldn’t be sitting here reviewing this colossal cinematic car crash, rather swerving the screenplay not knowing just how bad it was. Instead we endured just over two hours of less than average entertainment, Gerard Butler’s over the top acting and brain numbing & unbelievable bravado in one awful action scene after the next failing to impress the slightest bit. Indeed, the continuity in the cinematography is nothing short of atrocious, one scene seeing the car chase jump from the streets of London’s EC2 area, straight to the embankment by Westminster and back again, anyone who knows London remotely, spotting these fatal flaws in both film making & editing. Furthermore, with vein attempts on realism falling far too short of the believable mark, supposedly clever slight changes to names of world dignitaries, actors with barely believable resemblances employed only adding to fuel to the fire in concluding that this fable is just too farfetched & full of faults throughout. In fact, with no ultimate reality of depth to this dreary delivery, the only shining light in this whole charade, was a reasonable performance from disaster movie stalwart, Morgan Freeman, who can be commended for being probably the only plausible player in this pitiful motion picture. And it seems we are not alone in our view, average review ratings down in the twenty percentile, so had we seen these first, we would have avoided this scurrilous screenplay on Sunday, indeed on any day; London may have fallen in this film, but this film has fallen in our estimation. (DISCO MATT)