Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen puts Gerard Butler in the White House and blows the doors off it. The 2013 film stars Butler as Mike Banning, a Secret Service agent demoted to the Treasury Department eighteen months after a snowy bridge crash killed First Lady Margaret Asher. When North Korean-led terrorists storm the building, Banning is the only man inside who can fight back.
The premise is simple and the film knows it. Olympus Has Fallen runs 120 minutes and rarely stops moving. That momentum is the movie’s best quality and, in the end, almost the only one.
Trailer, via Rotten Tomatoes Trailers.
Mike Banning and the Bridge
The film opens with Banning on the presidential detail, close to President Benjamin Asher, played by Aaron Eckhart. Banning has a warm bond with Asher, Margaret, and their son Connor. Then the state car slides off a bridge in the snow. Banning saves the president. The limousine falls. Margaret dies.
Eighteen months later, Banning works at Treasury. The demotion is the film’s one attempt at character. It does not go far. Banning is a man with a dead First Lady on his record and a desk he does not want.
That is the whole interior life the screenplay by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt gives him. Butler plays the hurt plainly, and it lands early. Then the guns start and the film forgets he had a wound at all.
Kang Yeonsak Takes the White House
The assault is the film’s centerpiece and its clearest success. President Asher is meeting South Korean Prime Minister Lee Tae-Woo when North Korean terrorists under Kang Yeonsak, played by Rick Yune, hit the White House in a coordinated attack. They have help from Dave Forbes, a former Secret Service agent turned private security contractor, played by Dylan McDermott.
The terrorists seize the building. They hold Asher and top officials in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. They execute Prime Minister Lee on live video for the world to see. Before he dies, Agent Roma gets word to the Pentagon: “Olympus has fallen.”
That phrase is the film’s title and its best moment. The storming of the White House is staged with real weight. Fuqua shoots the grounds, the fences, the corridors. The building feels like a place rather than a set. For twenty minutes, Olympus Has Fallen is a genuinely tense thriller.
A Radio and a Speaker of the House
Banning enters the White House, disables its surveillance systems, and uses Asher’s satellite earphone to reach Secret Service director Lynne Jacobs, played by Angela Bassett, and Speaker of the House Allan Trumbull, played by Morgan Freeman. Trumbull is acting president, running operations from the Pentagon’s emergency briefing room.
Freeman and Bassett are the film’s adult presence. They sit in rooms and react. Bassett gets the sharper material, and she makes Jacobs a professional rather than a symbol. Freeman does what Freeman does. He is calm, and the film leans on that calm hard.
Melissa Leo appears as Secretary of Defense Ruth McMillan, one of the hostages. Cole Hauser plays Agent Roma. Radha Mitchell plays Leah. Robert Forster and Ashley Judd are also in the supporting cast, along with Phil Austin as Vice President Charlie Rodriguez and James Ingersoll as Admiral Nathan Hoenig.
Cerberus and the Nuclear Threat
Kang’s demand is that Trumbull withdraw U.S. forces from South Korea. That is the cover. His real goal is to detonate the American nuclear arsenal and turn North America into a radioactive wasteland. He wants retribution for his mother’s death.
To do it, he needs the Cerberus system, the nuclear fail-safe. The film turns its last act into a race for three codes. Banning has to get them before Kang does.
This is where Olympus Has Fallen stops being a thriller and becomes a countdown. The stakes rise, the logic drops. Kang’s plan requires the audience not to ask how a guerrilla force holds the White House for that long. The film asks anyway, and mostly gets away with it.
What the Action Gets Right
The action sequences are the reason to watch. Fuqua directs with a clear eye for space. You know where Banning is, where the terrorists are, and what stands between them. The hand-to-hand fights are brutal and short. The gunplay is loud.
Butler is convincing as a man who can do this work. He is large, tired, and mean in the right way. The film gives him a knife and a hallway and trusts him.
The violence is overt and constant. The film earns its R rating early and keeps earning it. Some of it is effective. Some of it is numbing. By the third act, the bodies stop registering, which is a problem for a movie that wants each death to mean something.
The Screenplay Is the Weak Point
The screenplay is where Olympus Has Fallen falls apart. The dialogue is functional at best. Characters explain the plot to each other in rooms. The villains are thin. Kang has a motive, a mother, and a plan, and that is all. Yune plays him with cold focus, but the script gives him nothing to be.
The film also has a politics problem it never solves. It uses a real country as the enemy and a real building as the target, then asks to be taken as pure entertainment. That works for the action. It works less well when the film wants gravity.
The bigger issue is that Olympus Has Fallen has no second idea. It is a siege movie. It is a good siege movie for a while. Then it is a siege movie with twenty minutes left.
Olympus Has Fallen Against White House Down
Olympus Has Fallen was one of two 2013 films about a terrorist attack on the White House. The other was White House Down, released three months later. That film underperformed. This one did not.
Olympus Has Fallen grossed $170 million against a $70 million production budget. It was released in the United States on March 22, 2013, by FilmDistrict. It launched a series. London Has Fallen followed on March 4, 2016, with the principal cast returning. Angel Has Fallen arrived on August 23, 2019.
The comparison to White House Down is the interesting one. Olympus Has Fallen is the meaner film, and meaner sold better that year. It is also the less fun film. White House Down had a lighter touch and lost. Olympus Has Fallen had a hard one and won.
The Score
Olympus Has Fallen received mixed reviews. Critics praised Fuqua’s direction, the action sequences, and Butler’s performance. They criticized the overt violence and the screenplay. That split is the correct read.
Here is the ranking of what actually works, in order:
- The assault on the White House, which is staged with real tension and a clear sense of place.
- Butler as Banning, who gives the film a body and a face it needs.
- Bassett and Freeman in the situation room, who keep the film from floating away.
- The final act, which trades tension for a countdown and never gets it back.
- The screenplay, which has one idea and spends it in the first hour.
The film’s tagline is “When our flag falls our nation will rise.” That is the whole thesis. It is a slogan, not a story.
Olympus Has Fallen is a well-made action film with a hollow center. Fuqua can stage a siege. Butler can carry one. The film around them cannot decide what it is about beyond the siege itself, and so it becomes a series of well-shot rooms.
It is worth watching once for the White House assault. It is not worth watching twice. The 2013 film that got a sequel is not the better of the two White House movies. It is just the one that hit harder and thought less.
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