Metacritic-Rezensionen

While Olympus Has Fallen breaks no major new ground in the political thriller genre, Fuqua has directed a sharp, very taut adventure that keeps you engrossed from start to finish.

Melissa Leo has some standout scenes as the secretary of defense, who gets pretty well beaten up for defying her captors, but others, such as Angela Bassett and Morgan Freeman, have little to do but bite their lips and look tense from the confines of their command posts.

The film spends its first act establishing a flimsy emotional groundwork before gleefully taking a sledgehammer to it just seconds into act two.

A Red Dawn for the Tea Party era, Olympus Has Fallen is pretty ridiculously entertaining—or at least entertainingly ridiculous—for long stretches, dulled only by the realization that there are many parts of the country where this will play as less than total farce.

Generates a fair amount of tension and produces the kind of nationalistic outrage that rock-ribbed Americans will feel in their guts.

Perhaps every generation gets the movie stars it deserves. “Olympus” has quite a bit to say about the current state of our country. Intentions aside, not all of it is entirely flattering.

The countdown-to-Armageddon structure generates almost no tension, but Olympus Has Fallen does have lots of squalidly bloody hand-to-hand action, all of which is so pulpy and standardthat the film actually makes you grateful for the presence of Gerard Butler, gnashing his teeth in the Bruce Willis role.

The movie is so apolitical; there could have been a nice slant to the movie, about how both sides of the aisle could get together to kick out these Korean terrorists. Instead, it remains totally void.

If you’re just going to rip off the action movies of yore, why not rip off more of the good stuff?

Nearly everything that happens in Olympus Has Fallen is ludicrous, yet because the fate of the president and the nation hangs in the balance, the crisis is treated with the gravitas of Paul Scofield at the West End.