Review of Angel Has Fallen (2019) by Meritcoba — 14 May 2020

Nick Nolte plays a grumpy old guy who blows up a score of bad dudes in a confrontation on a mountaintop that is a somewhat reminiscent of the first Rambo movie. That is the only fun part of the movie and, alas, very short. It is why I gave it a three, instead of a two.

There is also another guy in this movie, played by Butler. He is an ailing secret service guy past his prime. Despite that he kicks the butts of men half his age, and outwits everyone. Not because he is smart, but because he has plot armor and plot brains and everyone else is shockingly dumb or incompetent. This is how you write a story when you are unable to make a smart guy do smart things. He basically just runs to some place and survives everything with nary a scratch. At one moment he actually runs into a room where a bad guy has the drop on him. But the bad guy waits for Butler to shoot him.

There are so few surprises that it actually surprised me. It takes half a braincell to figure out who the evil guy is behind it all, how the story would develop and how it would end. It was so unsurprising that I actually braced for a twist of some kind, but once the bad guy's voice was being warped when talking to the second main bad guy, I knew it was as bad as I thought it would be. This was just done for the audience.

The biggest surprise for me is that three people wrote the script. It is amazing that you need three writers to write a by the numbers story with characters that have no depth or arch and a story that is as shallow as politician's promise.

A terrible movie.