I don’t know what is in the air, but the 80’s hardcore action flick has made a comeback. These are movies defined by wise cracking heros laying waste to the enemy with hands, feet, knives, guns, explosives, and random household items. A hero that single handedly is able to do what the police, fire, FBI, and US Military can not: beat the bad guy. The better of these of recent times are The Raid: Redemption and Dredd. Then there are the cringeworthy bad kind like The Expendables 2. Now, filling in the current void comes Anthony Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen. I am happy to say it falls firmly in the former camp with Dredd.

Gerard Butler comes in as resident bad-ass Mike Banning, secret service agent extraordinaire that is banished from the White House after a presidential car crash sequence that will have you wondering why anyone would ever drive so fast in a blizzard on a bridge. Banning is called back into service by circumstances outside his control. From his boring office across the way at the Treasury Department, he witnesses Korean terror squads take over the White House in wave after wave of fairly ingenious attacks. I have to commend Fuqua’s direction in the attack sequence as it answers a lot of the “well why don’t we just…” questions. Like, “why don’t we just get some jets and take them all out?” It’s a full throttle, slam bang, and more bang and slam action sequence that doesn’t let up for a good ten minutes.

Witnessing the carnage, Banning enters the fray and soon finds himself the only person alive and thus begins his one man rampage of fists and wisecracks. And while I found Gerard Butler generally compelling, I don’t blame him one bit for not finding the humor in the line “I’m gonna stick my knife through your brain.” I think it was supposed to make me smile or something.

As Banning traipses the halls of the White House taking out bad guys and once in awhile taking time to emote, I came to a massive realization. I was watching the Die Hard movie I had hoped I would be watching when I went and saw the travesty of a film called A Good Day to Die Hard. Banning is a conflicted character, who doesn’t want to be here, who kills because it’s necessary, and sneaks around this confusing building, while talking to the enforcement on the outside who are unable to do anything. This is Die Hard. Well, Anthony Fuqua’s Die Hard. Which means there is a ton more of gouging, breaking, and stabbing of the eyes, neck, legs, and head than is typical of Die Hard. There is also a lot more bullets to the brain and a lot more of things exploding (usually a head from being shot point blank).

One thing Fuqua’s direction doesn’t lack is bombast. One thing it does lack is restraint. There’s a sequence involving a plane and the Washington Monument that is completely unnecessary, looks phony, doesn’t add anything to the story, and I’m sure cost a lot of money. He could have and should have cut that out. Also, his love of heads exploding is a little disturbing. Did I mention people get shot in the head a lot?

I wish some of the attention to killing would have been placed on the scripting of the outside enforcement that Banning stays in contact with. Morgan Freeman plays Speaker of the House, Trumball. He is joined by Secret Service Director Lynn Jacobs (Angela Bassett) and General Edward Clegg (Robert Forster). It’s hard to say anything negative about three powerhouse actors going at each other, but together they make every possible bad decision there is to make and it becomes exhausting watching them do nothing useful… ever. Heck, 5 minutes into learning the big American secret, I knew what the villains were planning to do. But not our three remaining leaders of the free world. They are in for the shock of their lives in about 80 min. In the meantime the President (Aaron Eckhart, who’s making a living playing powerful men who get kidnapped and watch people die around them), exacerbates the situation by giving orders for his staff to hand out their oh so secret 6 character pass codes. By the way – 6 character passwords wouldn’t even be allowed on Gmail, much less nuclear controls.

But really, none of this matters as it’s a vehicle for Gerard Butler to kick butt. And oh does he. By the time the movie is over, he’s killed almost everything that can be killed. If potted plants had eyeballs, he’d have stabbed them. I’m sure he’s not a martial arts expert, but Fuqua’s direction and masterful editing makes me believe he could hurt me really bad. The camera does not feel like it’s cheating and really gave me a good sense of what’s going on in the sequences. In The Expendables 2, I marvelled at how the entire movie was shots of people firing guns followed by shots of bad guys falling over. Olympus Has Fallen gives us a really good sense of the geometry, geography, and viciousness of the action. Kudos for that.

So my recommendation for this film comes with a caveat. You must be prepared to let some niggling logic problems go, you must accept some cliched action hero moments, and you must be willing to watch copious amounts of death and carnage at full volume. But if that’s okay with you, go for it; you’ll have a blast.

However I can’t help but think none of this would have happened had Morgan Freeman just done what Arnold did in Commando when faced with a villain threatening his family’s life. Arnold didn’t do as he was told. Arnold shot the villain dead right at the top of the film and then went to save his family. Still, Schwarzenegger-esque moments end the film with the President of the United States of America telling a light hearted, feel good joke while ignoring the surrounding piles of dead American law enforcement.

Long live the 80’s.