London Has Fallen

This sequel to 2013 White House siege thriller Olympus Has Fallen relocates to an overcast London for a state funeral that, after a creditably tense build-up, is then plunged into chaos by a well-planned terrorist attack. However, while other lookalike world leaders, civilians and emergency personnel are slaughtered, our empathy is supposed to shift wholesale to Gerard Butler's violent, foul-mouthed Secret Service agent and Aaron Eckhart's unlucky US President as they improvise an escape. There's something nasty about this orgy of below-par CGI destruction pulling the lever for quip-punctuated thrills ("I always wondered when you were gonna come out of the closet" after Eckhart opens fire from a cupboard). Colin Salmon and Charlotte Riley lead the stoic British response, while Morgan Freeman and the Joint Chiefs fret remotely on the other side of the Atlantic, and Butler's pregnant wife chews her lip at laughable news reports ("Terrorists have decimated nearly all the known landmarks in London"). Director Babak Najafi (Easy Money II) manages to extract some black comedy from all the pyrotechnics, although calling the PM Clarkson is an unintentional gag, and showing a US drone strike killing a wedding party does little to alleviate the general mood of American arrogance.