Another day in the life of securing the president has Gerard Butler on a rollercoaster of life and death, in “London Has Fallen”. In the sequel to the worldwide smash hit “Olympus Has Fallen.” The second film in this saga begins in London, where the British Prime Minister has passed away under mysterious circumstances. His funeral is a must-attend event for leaders and peacekeepers alike, of the western world. However, what starts out as the most protected funeral on Earth turns into a deadly plot to kill the world’s most powerful leaders, devastate every known landmark in the British capital, and unleash a terrifying vision of the future. Caught in the middle are the only three people who have any hope of stopping it: the President of the United States Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart), his formidable Secret Service head Mike Benning (Gerard Butler), and an English MI-6 agent in Jacqueline Marshall (Charlotte Riley) who rightly trusts no one. The trio race against a clock of countrywide destruction to save the day and bring the terrorists to justice. “London Has Fallen” is rated R for strong violence and language.

Director Babak Najafi takes the reigns from critically acclaimed director Antoine Fuqua, who directed the series first offering “Olympus Has Fallen”. This is Najafi’s first big budget debut, and because so there is a lot of positives and negatives that can be said for some stylistic choices he made for the film. “London Has Fallen” is in no means an intriguing or needed sequel to the 2013 original. It’s short on exposition, long on action popcorn flick cliches, and a real test to even the truest of patriots and the decisions that their protagonists make for the film. On the latter of that statement, the movie happens because America bombed a wedding of a terrorist, killing his children and friends. I’m in no way standing up for a terrorist, but what did you think was going to happen? On top of this, the film is full of cringe-worthy American pride dialogue that will have you slowly working your way to the other side of who you’re rooting for. It’s a pro-patriot film sure to produce defects.

The film is riddled in bare minimums and a muddled mood from the very first shot of the film. From the opening ten minutes of the film, we get as much backstory as we’re ever going to get, offering the bare minimum of what has happened since. There’s that point that the audience feels that this is going to be as high emotionally as our investment will ever get, and as close to that original film that stole our hearts. Make no mistake about it, this movie just never felt like a real audience movie, and what I mean by that is it keeps its audience on a mute level of reactions at all time. There’s no squirmy scenes of violence to satisfy the carnage candy in all of us, little to no humor (Although there is a lovely homophobic joke about midway through), and overall no movement of the mood needle to ever remove us from this coma. The film isn’t boring, its oddly paced well enough to know that its flacid plot is nothing more than a 93 minute brief project. It’s just so anti-charasmatic that its hard to justify a sequel to rip away what little was good about the first movie.

What Najafi does know to do is take some risks behind the camera with his action sequences. It wasn’t hard to debate, but my favorite scene in the film is a two minute scene in which it feels like one long continuous war shot, complete with fast lighting bullets flying by and camera work revolving around our characters movements behind buildings and cars while trying to stay alive. His overall chase scene presentations aren’t original by any means, but they are shot strong enough to always layer the terror that our characters face with each passing minute. What hurts is the CGI in blood and smoke that gave the movie a permanent after midnight showing on TNT. Not only is the blood slightly off color, but it looks like The Walking Dead’s effects and totally doesn’t feel justified with the cause-and-effects presented on-screen. Then there’s the fire. Some of it is real, but the big scale stuff is CGI. There’s no problem with the way it looks, but did we have to have long-shot scenes in which characters are clearly walking on and through where the fire is without even so much as the slightest shriek in terror. This shows me that second and third edits to the movie wasn’t paid the slightest detail of attention, and the movie feels like a parody of itself because of stupidity like this. The shark has been jumped, and its swimming through a lake of CGI fire without a care or pain in the world.

On the subject of characters, there really isn’t much room for growth because of the lack in developmental exposition. Gerard Butler is annoying, mostly because his character is a robot at this point who feels no pain and never feels even the slightest fears. Even in scenes that should have him worried for his life, he still has time to stop and rub America in the face of his pursuers. Besides his lack of pain and consequence, what really demeans a character like Butler’s is the fact that there isn’t an antagonist as strong physically or as brutal in physicality as him. It leaves the tense scenes in an anti-climatic cloud that the movie never comes down from. Aaron Eckhart is Aaron Eckhart. Nothing to see here. Morgan Freeman continues to play the autopilot role he has been playing for the better part of a decade. He’s a much better actor than this material, but the script has him at a desk staring into a monitor for 90% of the movie, all while alternating between two different haircuts. The latter wouldn’t be a problem if the movie didn’t take place in a single day. Charlotte Riley is the only welcome breath of fresh air. Her performance as this straight-forward MI-6 agent is a positive voice for female incorporation into the franchise. She commits the most to ridiculous material, and really showcases a strong presence without going overboard like Butler. The problem is that she is introduced with only 35 minutes left in the film, and we don’t see a lot of how deadly she is until the very end of the movie. I would’ve rather followed this character throughout the film, and Riley is someone I will be looking forward to for more future projects.

“London Has Fallen” is a perfect description for the tests in patience that this movie entails. Its change in mood and lead character categorize this movie in laughably bad popcorn flicks. Add a below-par CGI instructional, and you have a right-wing 80’s instructional fantasy of ridiculously bad stereotypes so bad it should be parody.

3/10