Paycheck

Ben Asslick, I mean Affleck, doesn't know what's going on. His character, that is. It's unproven whether Ben himself is all a bit simple. And anyway the character isn't simple, he's a technical clever bastard who reverse engineers people's technological breakthroughs then has his memory wiped in order to protect himself and his employer from prosecution. Have you worked out this is based on a Philip K. Dick story yet?

Uma Furface is his lovely love interest who is a doctor of plants and weather or something. She is utterly under-used and could just as well be a plant pot. Or an icicle.

Aaron Eccles Cake is the naughty bad employer bastard mean naughty horrid ooh he's such a bad guy.

Am I laying it on a bit thick here? Well maybe but that's nothing to the heavy hand with which John Woo (what's that Tom Cruise, he's 'the Woo'?) directs. Far too many close-ups on Affuck's expressionless face, way too few well written or delivered lines of dialogue, an excess of explosions and motorbike bullshit, a repeated cutaway of a slo-mo bullet spinning towards its target. In the future.

It's all about designing a machine to predict the future then, if you're Benbo, realising this is a terrible thing, almost like removing hope from Pandora's box and letting Cassandra dictate all world policy forever (yes, I've read some Greek mythology, why do you ask?). So Ben, knowing his memory will be wanked away leaves himself clues and items to help him work out what he wants to tell himself post memory wipe so he can kill the machine and stop Aaron Ecky Thump from ruining the world.

Pah! Kill them all, I say. Especially if John Woo can somehow be all killed in the process. Or, if not all killed then killed enough in the mind tank to make him forget he's a film director. Perhaps he could take up fishmongery? I don't really care what career he pursues, just trying to pretend I don't wish the people behind terrible films dead. Even though I often do.

Quite why Thurman or Paul Giamatti should have chosen to associate themselves with this shit escapes reason. Did Woo sell it as a futuristic Memento? If he did he lied. Fishmongery's loss is also cinema's loss.

Olympus Has Fallen

Weren't they shooting this and White House Down at the same time? They could have shared costs by using the same fake government buildings. And by not making White House Down.

Those who like their leading men to be eye candy will prefer Channing Tatumoneal in the other one. Those who prefer protagonists to look and sound convincing when they deliver gruesome one-liners and stab bad guys in the brain will opt for Gerard 'I Hate You' Butler.

This one's got Koreans kidnapping the president. Koreans were the naughty villains of choice for a while, like in the remake of Red Dawn. Hollywood not allowed to admit all the time that rogue terrorists with no allegiance to specific countries are the real problem to global security nowadays.

So, remember London Has Fallen? Well don't. It's not been made. This is the first movie and it's Olympus that falls. Olympus being the code name for the President. Not grandiose in the slightest, eh, referencing the home of Greek gods when you come up with a code name for your President.

Diamond Face bad guy from a Bond film is Non Diamond Face villain masterminding evil antics in the bunker below the White House after a completely unfeasible attack on Washington's favourite monuments and symbols. Aaron Eckhart is the Prez because he's got a jaw made from granite. Or is it marble? Something super strong.

And Gerry Butty runs about in the darkened, blowdy uppedy corridors of power, democracy's last chance, strangling, stabbing, shooting and swearing his fucking way to hero-dom. That's not a sexual fetish, by the way, hero-dom, it's a clumsy way of saying he's the hero despite having been unable to prevent the death of the President's wife at the beginning of the film.

I reckon he spends enough time in confined spaces to know what a TV dinner feels like. I reckon they'll make a sequel. Oh they have.

London Has Fallen

You know the basic premise of Die Hard: one gritty man defeats countless nasty terrorists? Multiply that by a billion and you have London Has Fallen. Sequel to Olympus Has Fallen but slightly less sweary. Unless I've got used to the swearing and don't even fucking notice it when it fucking happens.

Gerard Butler does not at any point say "Yippee kai ay!". Nor does he repeat the best swearing motif from the first film: "Let's play a game of Fuck Off; you go first." Which is a disappointment and ensured I spent a lot of the film waiting for it and probably missing the violent deaths of ten percent of the bad guys.

The plot? Ludicrous. More ludicrous than a big jar of Superludicrous which has been dipped in ludicrous sauce. Death of British Prime Minister brings world leaders to London for state funeral which is in fact an elaborate trap set by a vengeful Middle Eastern type who wasn't properly killed by American drones a few years previously.

The assassination of several of the leaders of major countries is mostly irrelevant because this is Hollywood and the only target that matters is the President. That's Mister President to you. Aaron Eckhart to his friends. Or Aar. Maybe. I don't really know him that well. Luckily Aar has Gerard on hand to shoot and stab and curse them through bullets, stinger missiles that bring down their helicopter, London tap water, Charlotte Riley's ever so slightly misaligned eyes, and a great big machete which is meant to be the instrument of the President's execution live on that Internet.

Phew, what a thrill ride. A ludicrous, sweary thrill ride. Only less sweary than the last one. I fucking think. Some of the swearing was from English people and I'm trained not to hear that. Unless it's about my relatives and then I get cross.

And come the end, what have we learned? We've learned that Hollywood executives will throw money at explosions if at least one bankable star is involved. And that Butler's American accent has not improved that much since the last one. And that we don't believe a fucking moment of it but it was kind of fun anyway.