In the spirit of last year's Red Dawn, "Olympus Has Fallen" has North Korean baddies launching a major attack on the United States.  Instead of trying to take the entire West Coast, the North Koreans are out this time to capture the White House along with three key individuals -- the President (Aaron Eckhart), the Secretary of Defense (Melissa Leo) and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (James Ingersoll).  They are equipped with forty guys, two big garbage trucks, two armored trucks, suicide bombs, heavy machine guns, the ultimate anti-helicopter weapons system "Hydra," and an AC-130 gunship.  The last two were actually manufactured for the US military (the former doesn't even exist yet) and have US military markings.  How the North Koreans got a hold of them is, needless to say, never accurately explained.

Chief bad guy Kang Yeonsak (Rick Yune) isn't even a formal North Korean agent; he runs his own organization from inside the South Korean presidential guard, meaning that every South Korean security person who goes down to the bunker below the White House when the attack begins, is actually one of his.  So is Dave (Dylan McDermott), a traitorous veteran of the Secret Service who turns out the best performance in this film.  Dave is not exactly a complex character, but his difficulty in figuring out which side he's on makes things interesting in a couple of scenes.
 
The John McClane of this movie is Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), former head of the President's Secret Service detail exiled to a desk job in the Treasury Department because he couldn't save the First Lady (Ashley Judd) from a limo accident which is shown in the first ten minutes or so of the movie.  He also once told the Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman, who takes over control of the government because the Vice President is also a hostage in the bunker) to go f*** himself.  (It turns out Morgan Freeman will make a bad movie if you pay him enough.  To quote President Asher, "What's the going price for souls these days?")  When I heard this I wondered if Mike Banning is actually based on Dick Cheney, who once said the same thing on the floor of the Senate to Patrick Leahy; but Banning doesn't shoot anyone accidentally with a shotgun during this movie so that's impossible.

So it falls to Banning during the tension-filled night of July 5-6 (year unspecified but probably 2021, just after President Asher has been re-elected) to first rescue the President's pre-teen son (Finley Jacobsen) and then kill all the North Koreans one by one as they hunt for him throughout the White House.  Actually, he will usually take on a group of about five at a time and kill two or three of them while the others fall back. 

Banning's ability to avoid being shot while all this is happening is even more unbelievable than the idea of a mere platoon of commandos overrunning the White House, although definitely the most unbelievable part is that the commandos were able to install the "Hydra" system between the time the armored trucks arrived and the time the US Army did.  The second most unbelievable part is that the system for blowing up a US nuclear missile in flight can only be controlled from the computers in the White House bunker, which means only Manning can deactivate it and then only after he has killed Kang.  The movie would have been less predictable if Manning had deactivated it and then had to hunt for Kang.  Between the fact Kang does not escape and the general woodenness of most of the characters, I rate the possibility for a sequel at zero, thankfully.

If we cared a little more about the characters it might have been more possible to suspend disbelief in "Olympus Has Fallen," but the fact we don't condemns this movie to one-star status.  It makes me wonder why I am still going to see formulaic action nonsense like this.  It's not like I'm made out of money nor am I going to live 200 years, which my mother once cited as the only thing that could persuade her to watch a zombie movie.  I mostly went because I wanted to see just how unrealistic it could be.  The answer:  very.  Please spare yourself from this waste of time and money.

Recommended: No

Movie Mood: Action Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Everything