On the Third Day of Die Hard, My True Love Gave to Me...

We now come to the third, and so far final, part of the Has Fallen trilogy, Angel Has Fallen, and, credit where it’s due, this movie at least has a different plot than the ones that came before. Instead of some kind of classless Die HardThe 1980s were famous for the bombastic action films released during the decade. Featuring big burly men fighting other big burly men, often with more guns, bombs, and explosions than appear in Michael Bay's wildest dreams, the action films of the decade were heavy on spectacle, short on realism. And then came a little film called Die Hard that flipped the entire action genre on its head. rip-off we instead get a classless The Fugitive rip-off so, I guess, thanks? If that sounds harsh, well, it is, but that’s because this is a really terrible film. It’s exceedingly stupid in its setup and delivery, creating a plot that is so obvious, so simple, and so direct that you have to wonder how any of the characters within the world of this movie actually buy into the plot happening around them.

It also starts to create a real issue for the believability of the universe of the films (as if that couldn’t already be called into question by the previous two movies, Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen). This is the third film, in six years, where someone manages to put the life of the president in danger. Three not just credible, but also effective, threats on the life of the President. That really calls into question the efficacy of the U.S. Secret Service in these movies considering, in real life, most presidents go their whole term (or terms) without ever having anyone even get close to pulling something like this off. It really stretches reality just a tad too far.

Before we get into the plot of the film, I do also want to point out that the movie clearly was designed as a pair up for Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhardt for a third time. The first film came out in 2013, which would have been one year into the president’s term within the universe of the movie (assuming their terms align with presidential terms in real life). The second film came out in March of 2016, meaning the president, Ben Asher, would have already been reelected and would be two months into his second term. But here, in 2019 for the third film, the president has been swapped out for Morgan Freeman’s Allan Trumbull (who was Speaker of the House in the first film and Vice President in the second) despite it clearly still being within a president’s second term. When you watch the film and hear the dialogue it really feels like a search-and-replace job to swap character names around when Eckhart didn’t come back. That only adds to the sloppy vibes this film puts out.

The movie finds Agent Mike Banning, top guy on the President’s detail, once again caught up in a threat against the president’s life. This time some shady operators came for President Trumbull while he was on a fishing trip, and Banning is the only guy (out dozens and dozens of men) to survive the attack. He manages to save the President, getting him away from a series of exploding drones sent to kill him, but both are knocked unconscious after. When he wakes, Mike finds himself cuffed to his hospital bed, accused of being the sole gunman that sent the drones to kill the very man he was protecting.

Obviously Mike isn’t behind this attack. He’s a loyal agent and has nothing but respect for the president. The evidence seems overwhelming, though, and Mike is quickly railroaded through the process while the president lays at the hospital in a coma. As he’s being transported off to prison to await his trial, though, a group of special ops guys, sent by the person that framed Mike, come for him. Being the super agent he is, though, Mike fights them off and frees himself, putting himself on the run. Now he has to find a way to clear his name and get the man that framed him before they’re able to finish the job and kill the president for real.

As I noted above, I do want to credit this film for at least trying something new. The first two films were variations on the Die Hard theme, clearly aping bits and pieces of storytelling from the original Die Hard for the first Has Fallen, and then Die Hard With a Vengeance for the sequel. But this film pulls away, setting Mike on a different path where he’s fighting against the people he usually is working with. It could be a decent riff on The Fugitive, setting our hero that we’ve watched for two films already on a path to fight the system he swore to protect.

Of course, that would require this film to be at all intelligent. This film, though, doesn’t actually understand how a setup like this should work. Its first problem is that it doesn’t establish an interesting mystery. Mike has been framed which means someone is behind the framing. A good film would use characters we already know while setting up a lot of red herrings, all to keep us guessing about who is behind the frame up and why? None of that happens here. We’re introduced to the characters that are clearly going to be the bad guys early on and within minutes of their introduction Mike is framed and they’re revealed to be the villains. I’m trying hard not to spoil it here, just in case, but the film basically spoils it all in the first act, meaning there is never any mystery.

The second issue is that Mike has no arc in this film. For a good The Fugitive riff, our hero needs to work to clear his own name. Just running from the authorities isn’t enough, they also have to actively work to figure out who is behind the mystery and why. Mike doesn’t do any of that; instead he runs around for a bit, causes some damage, and then arrives back in the third act of the film to save the President while everyone else has already done the work of solving the mystery for him. Mike doesn’t have an active hand in any of it; that job is instead passed to a couple of FBI agents and they handle everything.

It’s just baffling that the people writing this film, Robert Mark Kamen, Matt Cook, and Ric Roman Waugh (the latter of whom also directed the film). They get so much of the formula for a film like this wrong. They don’t understand how to put the film in motion. They don’t get what is required to make a compelling thriller narrative. What they’re focused on are big set pieces – the drone strike that sets the film in motion, a later battle against troops in the middle of the woods, and then a climactic third act battle. These scenes aren’t bad, bear in mind, but they feel at odds with the kind of film this movie wants to be.

It also doesn’t work considering the kind of hero we have on offer. Mike is generally seen as a shining beacon of patriotism (even while he’s murder hobo-ing his way through hundreds of terrorists). The characters in the film very easily think he’s the bad guy without a second thought, but we’ve already seen him go out of his way to save the President in two previous films, and the movie doesn’t do anything to change our mind about him before the action starts. Yes, he’s struggling with a concussion that has left him with constant migraines since the events of the last two films (a detail that is raised early but doesn’t actually impact him while he’s on the run), and yes he’s been taking prescription painkillers to deal with that but… that’s barely enough to make us think he has anything more than old age and some injuries. It’s not enough to color his character, for the audience, so that we could believe for a second he’d do this or, more to the point, that we’d believe anyone else that knows him would believe he could do this. It doesn’t work.

Beyond that, we’re never really shown that Mike is capable of setting off this kind of attack on the President. He’s supposedly framed via a money transfer in his take to a foreign bank account, but beyond that… where did he get the supplies? Where did he get all the drones? The attack was done via thousands of drones, each of which had to cost a few hundred dollars (due to the tech and explosives on each one). We’re talking millions of dollars of cash Mike had to have to pull this off, and supposedly he did it alone as well. Is he suddenly a tech genius as well? We’ve seen him login to Secret Service systems and put up pre-programmed firewalls before, but never do any kind of hacking or programming. He’s a John McClain type, comfortable with a microwave and not much more. This whole setup is out of character, and everyone around him should know it.

But the film never addresses that. It doesn’t evaluate his record or what he is capable of. It just drops him into the middle of a thriller (that isn’t thrilling) and sets him on an adventure to clear his name… where he doesn’t do any of that at all. It’s a dumb as hell movie that doesn’t work at all. Watching the film doesn’t just require shutting off your brain; it needs you to eject all intelligence from your consciousness. The film begs you to tear it apart as you’re watching it because it’s so idiotically empty and devoid of logic that trying to take it at face value is impossible.

And somehow, even still, this film was a success. On a budget of $40 Mil ($20 less than the previous film) it manages to make $146.7 Mil. Good for the producers to understand scaling back and creating a film that could work on a budget. Please, though, if we do somehow end up with a fourth film in this franchise (which has been threatened for years) can we use even a tiny fraction of intelligence on the story next time. Angel Has Fallen is somehow the dumbest, most vapid film in the set yet, and that’s saying something considering how braindead the previous moves were.