“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.”
