Page 50 Daily Mail, Friday, August 23, 2019
it’s friday! film
G
ERARD BUTLER is back as
hard-as-nails American
secret service agent Mike
Banning in the new instal-
ment of the Fallen franchise.
In the first two films, Olympus Has Fallen
and London Has Fallen, Banning was the
last man standing, protecting the American
President from increasingly ridiculous
assassination attempts.
But is that about to change in this third
outing, Angel Has Fallen? Has Banning, the
guardian angel of the White House, gone
rogue? And if so, do we care?
These questions arise almost immediately
after a drone-swarm attack on President
Allan Trumbull (a wise and wonderful Morgan
Freeman) when Agent Banning once again
survives against all odds, but the rest of the
secret service team end up as burnt toast.
With the President alive, but conveniently
in a coma, there is no one to defend Banning,
so our hero is forced to go on the run. As in
the earlier movies, he is pursued by heavily
armed men in black combat gear.
The nameless, helmeted fighters make the
cinema screen seem like a computer game,
an exercise in point-scoring rather than
drama. The rat-a-tat-tat gunfire is relieved
by the entertainment of seeing the usually
vigorous Banning plagued by doubts,
migraines and a frozen shoulder.
Battle-scarred middle-age is upon him. HisWith Gerard
Butler reprising
his role
as a
special agent
in Fallen, the
action’s a blast
... pity the plot’s
a damp squib
BACK WIT
dewlaps have fallen. Handfuls of
painkillers, his perky younger
wife Leah (Piper Perabo) and
even his baby fail to cheer him
up. When it comes to the couple’s
relationship, the script is so
cliched you can hear the clunks.
Yet Butler fans will enjoy the
expensive set pieces: inky drones
coming in like bats out of hell; a
macho car-crash escape; a forest
chase in an articulated truck;
and opposing S.W.A.T. teams
splattering one another all over
fancy office buildings.
The story is anchored in topical
politics with a plot involving
private military contractors,
keen to encourage more warfare.‘Time to take the gloves off and
make America great again!’ says
the gung-ho Vice-President
(Tim Blake Nelson, last seen as
the jug-eared cowboy Buster
Scruggs), channelling Trump.
The mercenaries are led by
leathery veteran Wade Jennings
(Danny Huston), an old army
pal of Banning’s. Jada Pinkett
Smith is also thrown into the
mix as a FBI agent leading the
chase, but her role fizzles out.
So far, so obvious. Fortunately,
the film is saved by the hilarious
entry of Nick Nolte, with his
tongue firmly in his cheek,
playing the role of Clay Banning,Mike’s long-lost father. Clay is
an ill-smelling, hairy hermit, and
his forest cabin is an ideal refuge
when Mike goes off-grid.T
HERE’S some father-
and-son re-bonding, but
Clay’s main hobby, as an
ex-military man and
full-time nutter, is keeping the
state out of his business, and he
has trip-wired the surrounding
forest with enough ordnance to
blow up a small city.
When he detonates, the scene
is a thing of joy. Even moreby Kate Muir
Angel Has Fallen (15)
Verdict: Troubled double-agent thriller ★★★✩✩Crawl (15)
Verdict: Girl-meets-gator creature feature ★★★✩✩wickedness. A check of news-
paper clippings would have
told him some of the appar-
ently secret details in the
letters had been reported.
For example, he alluded to
medical treatment the
Ripper’s ninth victim, Vera
Millward, had shortly before
he pounced on her outside a
Manchester hospital.
Oldfield felt sure this fact
could only have been divulged
from Millward to her killer —
forgetting it had been dis-
closed to the press, by the
police themselves and her
common-law husband.
Just a few months after the
tape was revealed, however,
Detective Inspector David
Zackrisson who was based in
Sunderland, produced abombshell nine-page report
on the letters and tape.
He pinpointed errors in
the sender’s arithmetic
concerning the number of
murders he claimed to have
committed. Wearside Jack
had omitted one of
the attacks.
Having studied similarly
goading letters penned by
the original Jack the Ripper,
Zackrisson also highlighted
the similar phraseology.
Analysts from the FBI and
dialect experts, as well as
women who survived attacks
by the Ripper, and remem-
bered his high-pitched Brad-
ford accent, would add their
voices to those who doubted
the authenticity of the tapes.
On being arrested, at his
council semi in Sunderland, in
2005, Humble was so drunk hecould not be interviewed. He
finally told police: ‘I don’t
know why I done it. I must
have been daft.
‘I regret it, like. Especially
them lasses who’ve died... the
coppers were useless. I
thought I was doing them a
favour because it intensified
the hunt then, didn’t it?’
He said later: ‘The case was
getting on my nerves. It was
on the bloody telly all
the time. I shouldn’t have
done it. I know that — because
it’s evil.’
Nobody who remembers
the haunting voice on
that tape — and certainly not
the families of the three
women murdered after he
made his intervention —
would disagree with Wearside
Jack’s pitiful, self-condemna-
tory assertion.FROM PREVIOUS PAGEV1