Convoluted like a story told by an only child trying to impress everybody at their parents’ dinner party, Angel Has Fallen is a weird film. It also feels like it’s having to do a lot of cultural heavy lifting. Resolutely respectful of military service but defiantly against the Palantir/Halliburton private-contractor approach to military industry, this film seems to articulate the difficult place that the Trump Cult of Personality has put traditional conservative principles into. This is a movie that feels like it would desperately like to be part of a much simpler era, perhaps one of the Golan-Globus Reaganite warhorses of the ’80s — like the Chuck Norris vehicles The Delta Force or Invasion U.S.A. But that’s not where the world, or action cinema, is at right now.
Mike Banning (Gerard Butler, who as always is reliable for bruisy, beefy gravity under any circumstances, even when facing a Geostorm) is the U.S. Secret Service agent hero of this trilogy’s two previous films (2013’s Olympus Has Fallen and 2016’s London Has Fallen). Banning has a gift for fighting impossible odds and finding victory with a strategic combination of blunt strategy and devastating neck-stabbings. He’s a generally good dude of principle who has nonetheless been beaten into submission by his previous adventures. He’s got debilitating physical and mental injuries, a doctor-shopping habit and a problem with reconciliation — between his job and his family, and between his past and his future.
So an imminent job vacancy — the head of the Secret Service (Lance Reddick, national treasure) is retiring — means Banning could finally be landing a stable desk job that could be the anchor he needs. There’s an unspoken skein of the film’s plot that uses PTSD, tinnitus and concussive trauma as the literal representation of what the past few years have done to the American psyche. Naturally, there’s a labyrinthine plot involving drone warfare, secret corruption, conspiracies on top of conspiracies, Russian shenanigans, going on the run and staying off the grid, and sustained action sequences that put Banning through the ringer and perhaps leave him better off than when he started.
Director Ric Roman Waugh understands the visual demands of contemporary action cinema, delivering hyperkinetic gun battles and frenetic cuts as expected, and excelling with the truly frightening drone attack that kicks the main plot into motion. There is a vicious efficiency to this sequence that cobbles together the exact right combination of sci-fi awe and visceral, exploding horror — the kind of horror that mainstream narratives and broadcast news extracts have minimized in an effort to redefine drone warfare as somehow more precise or civilized. There’s also a visually breathtaking sequence involving a prisoner transfer lit just by alternating red and blue LEDs that hint at the art-school majesties hiding just underneath the surface.
The supporting cast is an interesting lot: Morgan Freeman is the president, and he does that Morgan Freeman thing that only Morgan Freeman can do. Tim Blake Nelson, styled reminiscently of enemy of democracy Mitch McConnell, seems to be having a blast. Jada Pinkett Smith presides over her scenes but is given tragically little to do. Danny Huston ... well, in a way, he’s like Morgan Freeman, in that if you’ve seen him in any movies, you know what he’s going to be doing herein, and he does it.
And then there’s Nick Nolte. As Banning’s estranged father, he pops up in this film and blows it up from the inside with levity, perfectly deployed gruff silences and a gift for explosives that finds the crowd-pleasing catharsis in guerilla warfare. His presence elevates the film around it exponentially while also shoring up the conflicted emotional currents swirling around in the whole enterprise, and no amount of hinky green-screen work can diminish that. Â
