Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: About the most ridiculous terrorist plot conceived by Hollywood, but it works.  Good action and plenty of good one-liners.

On a scale of conceivable terrorist plots, Hollywood ranges from believable and real like “United 93” to patently absurd like all of “24”.  “London Has Fallen” falls far to the right of that scale.  And I mean FAR to the right.  It’s a dangerous way to make a movie because trending to the absurd can lead to loss of the suspension of disbelief, but in this case, it works.  And really, it’s worth seeing the movie just to witness the absurdity of it all and how effectively they pull it off.

The set-up is believable enough except for the whole “a bunch of state got together and agreed on something” part.  Without ruining anything, a bunch of states got together and agreed to launch a drone strike against a very powerful arms dealer who deals primarily to terrorists.  Lo and behold, they perform the strike at a wedding and all of the innocent people are killed and all of the bad guys survive.  The rest of the movie is said arms dealer’s revenge plot.

Another weird thing about the film is it’s kind of genre breaking.  It’s kind of a mix between a damsel-in-distress movie and a buddy-cop movie.  But in this case, the damsel/buddy is the President of the United States (Aaron Eckhart) and the hero/buddy is a Secret Service agent (Gerard Butler).  The two have a very good rapport together.  That might count a lot for my enjoyment of the film.

High brow movie making this is not.  But if you’re in for an over-the-top, non-stop action flick, “London Has Fallen” fits the bill quite nicely.  If I were to sum up the movie in one word it would be ridiculawesome.