Like Milius' Red Dawn (though not quite as accomplished technically), it's both completely indefensible substantively and yet a very enjoyable action film all the same. It knows what it is - jingoistic, idiotic drivel - but it's well shot and competently acted idiotic drivel if that makes sense.
Fuqua, in the mold of Milius, really has his heart-thumping loud and proud as an All-American, but he injects real red-meat and vigor into his direction of the action, which has its chaos but is never hard to follow or disorientating (or it's more controlled chaos to put it another way). Gerard Butler is... as good as he can be, which means he's alright, as an action hero for the first time in a while, and more believable than a Leonidas or whatever. Aaron Eckhardt was just one second away from accidentally yelling "RACHEL!" ala Dark Knight. And Morgan Freeman looked mostly tired, but could still command the screen better than half the rest of the people in the room save for Robert Forster. Oh, and did I mention this movie has a lot of logical gaps (Dylan McDermott's character, for example), and the CGI, such as when a certain rectangular monument is destroyed for no real reason except for cinematic eye-candy, looks so awful that your Windows 95 screen-saver was more convincing? There is that.
Olympus Has Fallen has an innumerable body count, effectively nasty-cum- stock villains, dialog that is to-the-point and story driven (even if that story, again, can be pretty stupid, and when it comes to those nuclear launch codes really needs a Dr. Strangelove in a wheelchair to come in and explain it to the Pentagon people), and I had a fun time watching the violence ensue. Perhaps when stacked up against actual bulls**** like Taken 2 or a Die Hard 5, its cinematic sins are slightly less egregious- it borrows from other films, liberally one might say (a little *original* Die Hard here, Air Force One there, any given hostage- crisis flick there, oh and how about most 24 episodes crammed into the climax), but somehow it trusts its audience to either be dumb enough to enjoy the ride, or that the smart people know its dumb but can enjoy its own dumb logic on its own terms. In other words, it's patently absurd, and all it's missing is a bald eagle to swoop in at the end to congratulate the heroes.
