By Ian Bonham

London has Fallen (15)

Staring : Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman

Director : Babak Najafi

Writers : Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt

Duration : 1 hour, 39 minutes

Showing at Kings Bastion Leisure Cinemas to  9^th March

Poor old London, it's not had a good run of things recently on the silver screen. Indeed, on the gogglebox it took a bit of a hit in 2005 when aliens in “Doctor Who” ran a spaceship through Big Ben. In 2013's “Thor: The Dark World” Greenwich took a bit of a pasting, again from a spaceship crashing into it, and they never paid the congestion charge, that’s how evil they were!

After repairing all that damage, Hollywood returns to London to blow it up again. Lots of it.

Following 2013's fairly successful “Olympus has Fallen”, a returning cast of Butler, Eckhart and Freeman are back and this time are relocated to London (spoiler is right there in the title!). The British Prime Minister suddenly dies and world leaders are called together to pay their respects at a state funeral. Guess what? It's a trap! Terrorists have planned it to get the world's great and powerful together in one place to wipe them all out in one go. As plots go, I have seen worse.

Does it gel together as a movie though? Well, I would say it is better than the previous one 'Olympus'. The action is turned up, and it's a much larger canvas for the plot than just being set in the White House. There are some exciting set pieces, and certainly one memorable jump-scare. However, all together it did not really work for me. I did keep thinking that Gerard Butler really wanted to be Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye (in 'The Avengers' et all). Aaron Eckhart was Ok as the U.S President, but I felt he did not put as much passion in to this as he did playing Harvey Dent in “The Dark Knight”. Morgan Freeman is basically playing Morgan Freeman, phoning in his performance, and Freeman has openly admitted in interviews he only returned because of the pay cheque - it shows.

The FX also bugged me slightly. I realise you cannot go blowing up London's landmarks in reality just for a movie so we have to rely on CGI, but the CGI here looked slightly hokey. I can't put my finger on what was wrong exactly, but some of the explosions I just could not buy in to.

Also, the music score at times really grated on me. I don't expect a symphonic spectacular in a movie like this, but the sound track is important in helping engage the viewer, be it a huge explosion or an emotional beat. Here, however, I felt like someone had gone through a set of library CD's and picked out the cheapest possible tunes to back things up.

In the titles, I count 20 people with Producer credits and maybe this is where things have gone wrong. It's movie making by committee, and the actual story telling has been lost. “London has Fallen” is basically the cinematic equivalent of painting by numbers.

That being said, you don't go along to this type of movie to be emotionally engaged or have your world views challenged. You are going to see things blow up, and bad guys get shot. If you go in with that frame of mind “London has Fallen” delivers by the bucket load. It's popcorn-munching, cola-slurping mindless entertainment. I can't be horrid about it, because it's not trying to be something it's not, it is what it is and wears that badge proudly!

I did notice in the screening I was in through, a higher number than normal of mobile phones being pulled out to check Facebook/Twitter, and the bag rustling was really bad, which indicated to me the movie was not really grabbing people’s full attention.

Finally, the biggest cheer of the night (seriously, there was a cheer!!) was the little cameo of 'Gibraltar House' in London. That was, for me, the most exciting part of the movie...