Olympus Has Fallen, review - Telegraph 15 cert, 120 min Dir: Antoine Fuqua, Starring: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo Around halfway through the action film Olympus Has Fallen, Gerard Butler's all-American secret service agent beats a North Korean terrorist to death with an iron bust of Abraham Lincoln. The film does not have a light touch with the geopolitical symbolism, or indeed much else: foes of freedom are sworn at, gunned down and knifed in the skull, while we sporadically cut away to a bullet-riddled Old Glory, flapping proudly in slow motion. film The premise: a mob of Korean goons storms the White House and kidnaps the US President, played by the far-too-young Aaron Eckhart. The bad guys are led by a man called Kang (Rick Yune), who demands that all Western forces withdraw from the Korean peninsula, and also has big plans for the US nuclear arsenal. Enter Butler as the President's faithful servant, who scampers through the front door and raises star-spangled hell. Director Antoine Fuqua made a great film in Training Day (2001), but here settles for passable pulp. Die Hard (1988) is obviously the model, and Olympus Has Fallen reminds you just how wonderfully balanced John McTiernan's film was: Bruce Willis's cocky nonchalance, Alan Rickman's slithery charm, the whipcrack action scenes, the ever-ratcheting tension. Fuqua doesn't come close to matching that, and Butler is a little short on quips to leaven the violence. But it rattles along with no little vim, and there is one excellent joke about the difficulty of finding a computer's hash key when time is tight.