London Has Fallen is the sequel to Olympus Has Fallen. In Olympus Has Fallen, evil North Koreans attacked Washington DC and the bulk of the action was Die Hard in the White House. This one grabs almost the whole cast from the first movie but never mentions the first flick at any point. This time, evil Pakistanis stage an attack on London, killing a number of world leaders but Gerard Butler’s secret service guy saves the president, again played by Aaron Eckhart. Can they escape London while a metric shitton of generic Bad Guys chase them around… while the UK has apparently no military to handle the situation.

Seriously guys, the bad guys have a TON of bad guys. I mean, wow. Every single intelligence service somehow managed to miss hundreds of terrorists sneaking into the country and infiltrating the cops and whatnot. This is perhaps the least of the dumb things that happen in an otherwise perfectly entertaining, if low-brow, action flick. Since the action largely works, I was perfectly willing to allow the plot to make very little practical sense.

The original flick was better ultimately – it had better bad guys (which is saying something) and the Die-Hard-In-a-Location bit with the White House was more interesting than the often fairly generic London setting (yes, the terrorists blow up a lot of landmarks but once they get out of central London, they could be anywhere). The special effects were just about as low budget as the first flick… serviceable but noticeably not great.

One thing the movie does pretty well are some pretty well staged single shot combat sequences. Elaborate gun fights down a city street and later inside a building that all look like it was done in one take. It wasn’t, you can usually see where they cleverly cut. It’s not as seamless as, for example, Children of Men or The Revenant but it’s still pretty good and honestly better than expected.

So, yeah, this is decently fun movie with solid action sequences. I’m sure logic didn’t come to stay but, as I said, I can give that a pass if the movie holds together and the action is fun and thrilling.

Score: 82