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.

Red Dawn

"I think at some point every bloke in this office has been up at the crack of Red Dawn," says David Brent early on.

Of course he doesn't. He's not even in the 2013 remake, let alone the original from 1984. Ricky Gervais was too busy looking like an Islington rent boy at the time so they cast Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen as two young brothers who lead a troupe of resistance fighters against an occupying communist force (Russians, Cubans, Nicaraguans).

Yes, I'm ploughing through guerrilla survivalist movies at the moment. They may provide handy tips for when capitalism dies somewhere during the Trump presidency.

Isn't it funny how if the guerrillas are Americans then they are heroes? The non-heroic guerrillas these days are the likes of IS but Red Dawn took its inspiration from the Afghan rebels battling against Soviet invaders. Ironic, given that those rebels would have been Mujahideen, literally jihadists.

Swayze's gang do not yell that God is great when they gun down enemy soldiers but they do shout "Wolverines!" the name of the high school football team now re-appropriated as a name for their fighting unit. It's not all boys, though. Jennifer Grey, like Swayze and Sheen, would use this movie as a springboard to even bigger starring roles in iconic 80s films.

We get some insight into the human side of one of the invading commanders, a Nicaraguan I believe,  whose past experiences as a freedom fighter in his own country allow him a more sympathetic opinion of the troublesome Wolverines than his Russian overseers.

A small band of kids against the might of combined communist forces isn't likely to get you great odds in a betting office and slowly their numbers dwindle as raids, the occasional betrayal and sometimes just youthful inexperience begin to pick them off. It's left to the two brothers to make one final assault into their occupied home town to exact as much vengeance as they can while the two other survivors head for 'Free America' to spread the news that guerrilla warfare is having some effect down south.

When it was released smack bang in the middle of the paranoid Reagan era, Red Dawn stirred and shocked audiences. It doesn't stand up quite so well in the early twenty-first century when small cells of attackers gun down civilians in city centres across Europe in the name of a distorted vision of religion. And America itself probably has more issues with white supremacists and crazed loners than coordinated terrorists, something successive governments since Reagan's time have been reluctant to acknowledge.

As a testament to the early promise of Patrick Swayze and as proof that Sheen never developed deeper aspects to his acting skills, Red Dawn is an interesting document of a more politically naive if just as polarised time.