Explosive
Summary
Angel Has Fallen is another massively enjoyable and action-packed entry in the trilogy with Gerard Butler making for an appealing badass and Nick Nolte looking believably disheveled as his conspiracy theorist father. Walmart’s new 4K Steelbook may not have any new special features, but the film looks and sounds the best it ever has, so if you don’t own it already I’d say it’s worth adding to the collection.
Plot: Authorities take Secret Service agent Mike Banning into custody for the failed assassination attempt of U.S. President Allan Trumbull. After escaping from his captors, Banning must evade the FBI and his own agency to find the real threat to the president. Desperate to uncover the truth, he soon turns to unlikely allies to help clear his name and save the country from imminent danger.
Review: I know this is an older review, but I thought I would do a new one for Angel Has Fallen as I just got the new 4K Steelbook from Walmart.
I do love the “Has Fallen” movies; they are a throwback to classic action movies like Die Hard with a one-liner spewing action hero who overcomes the odds no matter how insurmountable.
Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is one of my favourite action movie characters from recent years and even though Gerard Butler can’t ever truly hide his Scottish accent he is still a sympathetic protagonist.
This third entry in the series changes things up and isn’t a Die Hard scenario, but this time channels The Fugitive/Taken 3 with Mike Banning forced to go on the run when he is set up for an assassination attempt on the President (Morgan Freeman, who possibly should just be POTUS in real life).
Banning has essentially hit rock bottom as he is addicted to painkillers, suffering from insomnia and concussions, but keeping it all a secret from the people he cares about. The movie surprisingly has more depth than the other two entries and explores the psychological effects of wars on the people who fight in them.
This entry goes for The Last Crusade route by introducing Mike’s father played by the perfectly cast Nick Nolte who walked out on the family many years before. He has also been damaged by past wars and this may just help bring father and son together again. Nolte eats up the screen with every scene genuinely looking like a man who has been living off the grid for years and his scenes with Butler are some of the best in the film.
The first two movies in this series had the odd moments of unconvincing CGI and Angel Has Fallen only has a few mildly noticeable scenes towards the end, however there are some jaw dropping action sequences throughout. The explosions in the forest were my favourite, but there are some intense shoot-outs and plenty of practical action set-pieces.
*Spoilers ahead* Admittedly, the plot is for the most part rather generic so we can guess who the bad guys are early on, but there are a few surprises which I didn’t see coming. I enjoyed Danny Huston as the villain who uses his friendship with Mike to set him up which is an especially low thing to do, so we rapidly lose any sympathy for him.
Piper Perabo is now all of a sudden playing Mike’s wife after Radha Mitchell portrayed her in the first two films, but as I adore Piper then it didn’t bother me in any way; apparently the only reason Mitchell didn’t return was purely due to scheduling conflicts.
Despite being rather predictable the story flows well and there is some humour however, Mike doesn’t have many one-liners this time around going for a mildly more serious tone. It works for the story and there are still a few laughs (mostly banter between father and son) but nothing that matches “let’s play a game, it’s called F*ck off. You go first.”
I also found that everyone turned on Mike rather quickly and wasted no time in believing he would try and assassinate the President; after everything he did in the first 2 movies you’d have thought that it was an obvious set up and give him the benefit of the doubt, but it would have been a short movie in that case…
The score may not have a particularly memorable theme, but it works dramatically for the movie with some epic percussion and it’s especially effective during the action scenes.
The new 4K Steelbook exclusively from Walmart has the same special features that were on the previous Blu-ray release, but the artwork looks nice and the upgrade to 4K in my book makes this a worthy upgrade.
The special features include: Calling All Angels, a behind-the-scenes feature about the casting of the film, and Earth Angel: Recreating DC, a featurette about recreating Washington DC as the film was shot in The United Kingdom and Bulgaria. Other special features include Fight For You: Stunts and Action, about the film’s action sequences and stunts, and Someone To Watch Over Me: New Blood, which explores the journey of writer-director Rick Roman Waugh and his experience writing the film. There is another special feature called Angel Declassified where Waugh breaks down three of the film’s scenes in detail.
I watched all of the features in one go the other night and they really demonstrate all the hard work that goes into putting an action movie together; the interviews are insightful and the featurettes are all around 10 minutes long, so even those with a really low attention span should enjoy them.
The picture quality looks much better on 4K than it did in the cinema and I thought the sound was great too; it also has subtitles which is always a must for me. Even if I wasn’t partially deaf I would have subtitles on as sometimes it tells us what some background dialogue is, filling in a few blanks.
Overall, I liked Angel Has Fallen a lot more the second time around and it looks and sounds fantastic on the 4K format. The special features may be the same as the Blu-ray, but if like me you just enjoy watching a film in the best quality then I’d say this is worth the upgrade. The film itself is action packed and I love seeing a fellow Scot as an action hero. I wonder what happened to Night Has Fallen as it’s gone a bit quiet on that front…