Expectations Have Fallen

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Before I saw Angel Has Fallen there was an advert on the radio which claimed that “it's the best of the Fallen trilogy” and “it's the film that's causing critics to go wild”. Now that first boast is the total definition of 'damning with faint praise' considering that the first two instalments of the Fallen trilogy were actual dog shit. The script for the first movie was so bad that lead star Gerard Butler's mates were apparently texting him in lines for it whilst the second movie managed to lower that bar even further by adding a little racism into the mix. Both movies were an irony and joke-free remake of Team America but in which the main characters were somehow even more convincing as dummies. I'm aware that technically the puppets in Team America were marionettes rather than dummies and that nobody has used the word dummy as an insult since about 1950. But in the words of Gerard Butler's Mike Banning, 'let's have a game of fuck off... you go first'. Saying that Angel Has Fallen is the best of the trilogy is like going to a restaurant and having the head chef claim that your food has less shit in it than an unflushed toilet. Technically that's true of a meal with no shit in it but it certainly makes it sound like he's pinched at least a little something off into it. In terms of the second boast, saying that the film is “causing critics to go wild”, is also interestingly worded. If critics loved it then wouldn't the advert just say, “the film that's loved by critics”? Because when I picture people going wild I don't imagine them to be having fun. I imagine them running down the street with their balls out after they've bitten a tramp in the face and are being shot at by the fucking police.

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It's not that I don't love Clint Eastwood but I had pretty low expectations when going to see his latest film The Mule. I mean, obviously he's made some stone-cold classics with Unforgiven being one of the greatest films of all time. But Eastwood waited a decade to make that film because he wanted to be the old man that the character he was playing was. And that's exactly what he was in that film. An old broken man. That was also almost thirty fucking years ago and somehow the old prick is still going strong. Well, I say strong... Some of his more recent films have been like when an old person tells a story that seems to last forever and you just wish for a plane crash to improve them. Although in the case of Sully: Miracle On The Hudson even the plane crash didn't help. Grandpa Simpson tells those exact kinds of boring stories and we let him off because we understand that he's doing it because he's old. Grandpa Simpson is 83 years old which, as I write this, is actually five fucking years younger than Eastwood himself.