London Has Fallen is the follow up to 2013’s surprisingly entertaining Olympus Has Fallen, sees the return of Gerard Butler as Presidential Bodyguard Mike Banning.

Olympus Has Fallen was, for me, a great modern day action film that was extremely reminiscent of the greats 80s or 90s action films like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Point Break or Speed. In London Has Fallen we see an upping of the scale, as instead of being trapped in a space as small as the White House, Banning and the President find themselves trapped in London after attacks on many of the world’s political leaders.

I found London Has Fallen to be a well-directed, well-shot and well-acted action film. It does a great job of keeping the audience engaged because it manages to not make the action too ridiculous and over the top (I’m looking at you Fast and Furious franchise), instead choosing to go for a brutal and well paced survival story.

As with the first film the evil plot, which involves capturing the president, when all other world leaders are immediately killed, is completely ridiculous. And whilst you are not really sure what the bad guys aims are in the film (they talk about the world changing… somehow) that doesn’t really matter when you are watching the film, as it is really about this small band of characters, that the film does a good job of getting you to care about, trying to survive in what seems like a hopeless situation.

This is not a film that is going to win any awards; instead it succeeds at its goals, and is making this one of the better modern action franchises. It also manages to do something that one of the other good action films of recent years, Taken, completely failed at, making a sequel that was not a complete rehash of the original, instead giving us plenty of new material here.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed London Has Fallen. And whilst I didn’t quite think it was as good as Olympus Has Fallen, if you enjoyed the first film then I’m sure you will enjoy the second as well.

6/10