London Has Fallen Kills the President and Never Learns

The President of the United States is dead. That is the premise of “London Has Fallen,” a 2016 action thriller that treats the world’s most powerful office as a punchline. The movie is a sequel to “Olympus Has Fallen,” and it repeats the same formula with even less care: a terrorist attack, a heroic Secret Service agent, and a plot that stops making sense halfway through.

Trailer, via LionsgateFilmsUK.

The Setup

The film opens with a terrorist group targeting the President during a visit to London. The attack kills him, and the surviving Secret Service agents, led by Gerard Butler’s Mike Banning, must hunt down the conspirators while protecting the new President, played by Angela Bassett. The premise is simple enough. The execution is not.

What Goes Wrong

The problems start early and accumulate fast:

• The terrorists are absurdly competent, able to coordinate attacks across multiple locations with perfect timing.
• The President’s death is treated as a minor inconvenience rather than the global catastrophe it should be.
• Mike Banning, who is supposed to be a hardened veteran, spends most of the film reacting with disbelief and confusion.
• The action sequences are staged with a single camera angle and no sense of scale or danger.

The film also leans heavily on exposition. Characters explain the plot to each other in full sentences, even when the audience has already seen the events unfold. This is not a movie about secrets. It is a movie about characters telling each other what just happened.

Why It Doesn’t Work

“London Has Fallen” fails because it never commits to its own stakes. The President’s death should be the central tragedy of the film. Instead, it becomes a bullet point in a checklist of terrorist targets. The movie wants to be a tense political thriller, but it keeps leaning on the same cheap tricks that made its predecessor a guilty pleasure: car chases, explosions, and Butler shouting at people.

The performances are adequate but unremarkable. Gerard Butler delivers his standard tough-guy growl, and Angela Bassett plays the President with a sternness that borders on parody. The supporting cast is wasted on a script that gives them nothing to do except react to the chaos around them.

The Verdict

“London Has Fallen” is a failure of ambition. It takes a premise that could support a taut, tense thriller and turns it into a hollow exercise in set pieces. The action is loud but empty, the dialogue is wooden, and the plot is full of holes that the film never bothers to patch.

There is a brief stretch near the middle, when the tension builds and the villains seem genuinely dangerous, that offers a glimmer of what this movie could have been. It lasts about ten minutes. Then the plot collapses again, and the film retreats into its familiar, broken pattern.

This is a movie that knows exactly what it is doing, and it still fails. It is not a film to watch sober. It is a film to watch ironically, with friends, and to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

action thriller · Angela Bassett · Gerard Butler · movie review · sequel fail