As a purely escapist action movie London Has Fallen is exciting and fun.  It isn’t as sharply focused as its predecessor, Olympus Has Fallen, but in some ways it’s even scarier.  The story has global heads of state traveling to London for the funeral of a British prime minister, all being targeted by a radical terrorist.  And in the way of American movies, only one imaginative Secret Service agent can be counted on to protect the president and deliver him to safety.

It’s all malarkey, to be sure, but I have a predilection for this particular brand of malarkey.  Babak Najafi’s film casts Aaron Eckhart as the most rugged president since Theodore Roosevelt and handsome he-man Gerard Butler as his protector, Mike Banning.  Banning, like Britain’s James Bond, is a one-man wrecking crew unafraid to torture, maim and kill anyone who threatens our commander-in-chief, which is how it works in the movies.

London, in bursts of sometimes unconvincing CGI effects, is devastated, and I’m sure that British fans will not be pleased with the portrayal of their ineffectual security forces, but hey, it’s only a movie.  It’s all pretty routine action stuff except for one sequence that I found to be very well done, when Banning and American special forces work toward the villain’s stronghold.  The camerawork in this sequence is excellent and the film is genuinely exciting.  It’s also hard not to root for the good guys to utterly obliterate the nasty terrorists.

If this isn’t your kind of film, skip it.  But if you like action pictures with familiar faces (Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Radha Mitchell, Jackie Earle Haley, Robert Forster, Charlotte Riley, Melissa Leo) and a little bit of heart, by all means tune in.  Its politics are simplistic but there is nothing wrong with a nationalistic approach to this type of entertainment.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  15 March 2016.