It’s probably best not to think of Olympus Has Fallen as a movie released in 2013. Antoine Fuqua’s film — about a band of North Koreans who invade the White House — feels from start to finish like a throwback to the action cinema and military thrillers of decades past.
It’s like an ersatz reproduction of an archaeological relic, if the archaeologists in question had just thrown together a bunch of random artifacts from different eras, taken a blurry photograph and then asked someone to make an accurate model based only on their memory of that photograph.
The obvious reference point here is Die Hard, with Gerard Butler stepping awkwardly into Bruce Willis’ shoes as Mike Banning, the man trying to single-handedly thwart a hostage situation from the inside. He’s a disgraced Secret Service agent, formerly part of the president’s detail, now languishing in the apparent purgatory of the Treasury Department. But when a massive coordinated attack on the White House from the air and the ground leaves the president (Aaron Eckhart) held hostage in the basement of the building, with most of his protection lying dead in the smoking ruins above, Banning is the country’s last hope.
At times the debt the film owes to Die Hard is so huge that it goes uncomfortably beyond homage and into wholesale theft. Try not to see Robert Forster’s Joint Chiefs chairman as this film’s Police Chief Dwayne Robinson, or the attempted Black Hawk attack on the White House as a direct quotation of the failed SWAT team assault in that movie.
Banning’s conversation with a villain disguising himself as a good guy in the house may as well have just inserted the analogous scene between Willis and Alan Rickman in the earlier film.