By A month ago, I signed up for Movie Pass. It’s a service where, for $45 a month, I can see a movie in a participating theater (which is most of them) every 24 hours. It’s a pretty cool deal, especially in New York City, where ticket prices are $14-$16 for your average 2D showing.
When you’re not really paying for every new ticket, the type of movie you’re willing to go see changes. Rather than only seeing the “Good Stuff,” you can justify seeing something you’re pretty sure isn’t going to be particularly well made but could be “fun” or at least a decent way to turn off your brain for 90 minutes or more. Movies like London Has Fallen. It’s a sequel to Olympus Has Fallen, a movie I didn’t see because I didn’t have a Movie Pass and sure as hell wasn’t going to pay $16 for.
But the reality is that, even with my Movie Pass, I’m not sure that seeing London Has Fallen would be worth it.
London Has Fallen
Director: Babak Najafi
Release Date: March 4, 2016
Rating: R
London Has Fallen seems like a movie made for people who really like Call of Duty. And while that sounds rather negative (because it is), I don’t necessarily mean that people who really like Call of Duty would like London Has Fallen, just that, in the boardroom meeting where this film was designed, at least one person said, “Let’s make this like Call of Duty. Call of Duty players are out target audience.” And everyone else said, “Call of Duty… that’s that thing that makes lots of money, right? We think making lots of money is a great idea. Let’s do it! It’ll be cool.”
It’s a film grown in a test tube to appeal to “bros” who like to think they crack wise. They’ll sneak in Budweisers to the movie and rowdily laugh every time Gerard Butler says some witty one-liner. They’ll think, “Wow! What a cool guy!” and high five or something. That’s what bros do, right? Clearly I’ve never been one.
More than Call of Duty, though, London Has Fallen reminds me of Youtube. Specifically, it reminds me of the channel formerly known as Freddiew. I don’t really watch Freddie Wong’s stuff anymore, but the short, vfx-heavy action videos that he used to post weekly were things I looked forward to. They weren’t perfect, but they were fun. Short, sweet, and to the point. On some level, so is London Has Fallen, a film that’s only about 90 minutes long, so it doesn’t spend a whole lot of time on unnecessary setup. For the most part, it just gets in and goes. People die. Gerard Butler has to save the day. Cool? Cool.
But the reason I compare it to Youtube is two-fold: 1) It doesn’t look very good. The VFX are shoddy throughout and it’s just a generally visually unappealing movie. I haven’t necessarily seen better on Youtube, but I’ve seen things that were on par. (Before I get into number 2, I really just want to make a point about how much I miss squibs. Yeah, they’ve been long dead, but the impact of real fake blood in a scene is so significant. There have been instances of CGI blood that have been convincing enough, but they certainly aren’t in London Has Fallen. Every death is accompanied by a little sigh, a feeling of missed opportunity. Sure, real fake blood is complicated, but it adds to the production, and this movie needed a higher-level production.)
2) Oh my god it’s vapid. Everything about it is just so… dumb. It feels like there was enough story for a short film (that I might see on Youtube) and then it was stretched out to 90 minutes because that’s how money happens. Dumb fun is dumb fun, but a little bit of effort would have been nice. It feels like absolutely no effort went into any part of this. A lazy script begets a lazy movie. And this movie is lazy.
It’s also cynical. The reason I thought of Freddie Wong in particular is because of a video he did many years ago, a firefight done in a long take. There’s a sequence in London Has Fallen, one that I think was supposed to be “epic” or “impressive,” that I just couldn’t fathom the reason for. Going to take a terrorist stronghold, London Has Fallen does that single-take-action-sequence thing. I love long takes, and I love long takes in action sequences, so I really should have loved the scene, but I just couldn’t do it. As I watched it, I could only think, “This is here because it has to be. No one really wanted to do this shot, because no one really wanted to do any of this.” Freddie Wong did it, so London Has Fallen had to do it too.
What makes the film hard to stomach is the fact that Gerard Butler’s character is a legitimately horrible human being. He is just cruel. He kills a man while his brother listens. Sure, he was a bad dude and may as well be dead, but in that way? Even the movie comments on it: “Did you really have to do that?” asks his companion.
“No.”
And that’s the movie in a nutshell. The filmmakers may as well as been turning to the audience and winking in that moment, and it just felt gross. Gerard Butler’s character likes knives. He likes stabbing people, and all I can think about is Heath Ledger’s Joker explaining why he prefers knives as well. Watching a movie about a sociopath with a smart mouth isn’t really enjoyable; it’s uncomfortable. And maybe if there was more to the rest of it, I could have blocked that out. I could have looked at the pretty visuals or rooted along with the action, but there was nothing. It was just me and the evil man who the film thought was the good guy.
And that’s just not cool.