Staying Fit
Rating: R
Run time: 2 hours 1 minute
Stars: Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Danny Huston, Nick Nolte, Jada Pinkett Smith
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Angel Has Fallen is what used to be called a B movie, but it delivers the goods briskly and has some resonance for grownup viewers, despite an over-the-top plot with few surprises and a director who started as a stuntman — this is the film Brad Pitt's Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood character might have made if he got an auteur break. As in the previous two films in the series, Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen, Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler, who turns 50 in November) guards the president (Morgan Freeman, 82, who seems amused to be playing a president yet again) against assassins, who stage a spectacular attack by a flock of killer drones with face-recognition software.
Eighteen Secret Service agents die, but (no spoiler) Banning saves the president, who unfortunately is in a coma and can't tell anyone who saved him. So the vice president (Tim Blake Nelson, 55) and the FBI agent on the case (Jada Pinkett Smith) find it suspicious that the drones recognized and spared Banning's face.
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And we find it suspicious that Danny Huston, 57, plays Banning's best old war buddy Jennings. Huston is more typecast as a bad guy than Freeman is as a president, and his sinister circumflex eyebrows echo his father John Huston as the ultimate baddie in Chinatown.