REVIEW: London Has Fallen (2016) Blu-Ray

You know this could well be the manliest movie of 2016 unless I’m strongly forgetting something else here. London Has Fallen comes in like a sorely needed air dropped care package of manly movie goodness, complete with witty one liners and brutal but effective action.  With its plot about a terror plot taking down a major western metropolis, it’s almost like the movie Live Free or Die Hard wanted to be.  But that movie was soft and silly, whereas this movie has skinned knuckles and perforated eardrums.

The action in this movie –  that doesn’t give a damn about trending – is brisk but brutal.  It has cool chase sequences, where real bikes end up in real smashes and all of it is filmed in a nice and lucid way.  Yes, there is some shaking camera work, but the type that is near imperceptible, as in there to contribute to the experience, not to define it.  Gerard Butler is once again a likeable action man, with an appreciation that old school brute force resolutions are okay in a movie and that there is no need to turn your nose up at it.  I like this guy, I’d nominate him as a worthy successor to our old favourites from the 20th century.

Complaints?  Not many, but the CGI annoyed me here and there.  Perhaps the fireball explosions were the worst and this is a problem carried over from the previous movie.  Fire, it’s a hard thing to replicate and pulling down famous landmarks with substandard imagery might well have been avoided.  However, the bottom line is that this is a damn fine movie and now that it is out today, we get to own this one on home media.

The picture quality is outstanding but nor is it poor.  We trod the usual Blu-Ray line here with a solid transfer filling out a 50gb disc with an MPEG-4 AVC codec.  The film is fairly dark during the third act and if you caught it at the cinema you may have squinted here or there.  Such a problem doesn’t exist here, a typical 1080p TV running this show on Blu-Ray will present depth instead of murkiness and for those who really dig their A/V experience, this one also comes with a DTS-X soundtrack.  Now I have to be honest and say I only made do with the impressive DTS-HD track, but for those who have crammed 12 state of the art speakers (11.1) into your room, I can only expect that it will blow your socks off.

As far as extras go, things are on the slimmer side.  The DVD copy is included as is the typical iTunes download option.  There are two documentaries.  One is a ‘making of’ and the other is a look at the architecture of an action sequence, but since the movie is pretty much a relentless action movie there isn’t too much difference between these two.  Since this is a Nu-Image movie to be honest I was expecting less, so perhaps we should take the 25 minutes or so and be grateful.

This is a fine manly movie, rough, no posing.  Very enjoyable re-watch.