★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Ta-dah! We’ve not even finished the first quarter of 2016 and already a heavyweight contender for worst movie of the year has appeared. London Has Fallen is bad in so many ways that at times it’s almost breathtaking. Let me count them for you.
Made by the Swedish-Iranian director Babak Najafi, it is a sequel to the grimly functional White House thriller of 2013 Olympus Has Fallen (which performed modestly at the global box office and hardly screamed “follow-up required”). It stars the Scottish action himbo Gerard Butler as Mike Banning, US Secret Service agent par excellence and partner in bromance to the mostly clueless US president, Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart).
When the pair get caught up in a “spectacular” terrorist attack that devastates London landmarks (cue pitiful, titter-inducing computer effects, possibly rendered on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum), it’s time for Banning to get tooled up, stalk the streets of Bulgaria (much of the movie was filmed in Sofia, going for that gritty London feel) and shoot, stab and strangle anyone who looks vaguely Middle Eastern.
Note that the terrorists here are shown clearly to be from Pakistan, but Banning prefers to call it “F***headistan” because that’s the kind of guy he is: straight-talking, shooting from the hip, casually racist but — you know — in a good way.
It doesn’t help that Banning and co are lumbered with some bizarrely clunky dialogue. “It’s a state funeral and Britain is our oldest and our strongest ally,” muses President Asher while chatting to his friends, working from a script that seems to have been produced by a robot in a trance but that has four credited writers (a shame that none seems to use English as a first language).
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Elsewhere, while reflecting thoughtfully on the nature of terrorism, Banning announces, with all the emotive prowess of a school bully who has wet his pants, “They killed all these people just to make everyone a little more afraid. Well f*** that. And f*** them.” This is, you might have guessed, a movie that deploys the f-bomb with blunt-force trauma and no imagination every minute or so. Indeed, they could change the title to London Has F***ing Fallen to reflect its content and ideology more accurately.
And yes the ideology is pretty toxic. It asks you to enjoy some kind of cathartic, post-Paris-attacks fist-pumping as it unleashes Banning on more than 100 Middle Eastern terrorists (although, in an act of gross intellectual cowardice, the terrorists depicted here are the secular gun-running kind, just so it doesn’t feel too icky).
It wants us to cheer with delight as Banning stabs Pakistanis in the eyes, stomach, back and legs and in one lowlight shoots a legless terrorist techie in a wheelchair (that’ll show ’em). And mostly it wants us to dance in the aisles when Banning spits out his climactic cri de coeur, while killing another Pakistani and articulating his belief in the clash of civilisations concept (“1,000 years from now, we’ll still be f***ing here”).
In these moments London Has F***ing Fallen is not just aesthetically bad, it’s morally rotten. And that, as any action fan will tell you, is not cool.
Babak Najafi, 15, 99min