'Gruel Britannia' - London Has Fallen Is Being Panned

Those hoping that the on-screen destruction of London would be accompanied by anything cinematically edifying might be about to have their hopes incinerated, like so many Big Bens.

The reviews of the Gerard Butler-fronted action sequel are out, and they’re not good.

Critics have gleefully slammed the movie, both for its apparently nonsensical plot and also dubious racial overtones.

Pithily, Guy Lodge in Variety hammered the movie, in which Butler’s presidential security man Mike Baning is beset by a terrorist network hoping to eradicate world leaders assembled for the funeral of the British prime minister, who, by the way, has died under suspicious circumstances.

“Cruddily crafted, grimacingly performed and effortlessly racist, this sloppy dish of Gruel Britannia may just go down well enough to green-light a continuing franchise of global destruction,” he writes. “World capitals quiver.”

Michael Philips in the Chicago Tribune was equally unimpressed.

“This one’s strictly for Butler fans, and for R-rated action audiences hungry for a scenario in which the good, and mostly white, people pick off the brown, completely inhumanly bad people by the dozen,” he wrote.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian didn’t fancy it much either, writing: “Butler and Eckhart realise that security provisions in foreignland mean zilch: they can only rely on themselves, along with a few loyal SAS guys and a pert female MI6 agent. But then it’s the same thing over again, with poor old vice-president Morgan Freeman looking like a stricken deer in the emergency ops room.”

All that said, a handful – and they’re just a handful – of critics deemed its riotousness worthy of some merit, though the compliments are very much veiled.

Kate Lloyd in Time Out called it ‘joyously ridiculous’ in her three star notice, while Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter explains 'Butler manfully dispenses justice here many times over, and even if the other main actors are in it strictly for the paycheck, they’ve all been in a whole lot worse in their time’.

Most damning, however, was Uproxx’s opinion, Mike Ryan suggesting 'it’s a perfect movie for Trump’s America’.

Shudder.

London Has Fallen, also starring Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman and Charlotte Riley, is out now across the UK.

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Image credits: Millennium Films