Angel Has Fallen  ★★★

IT’s two out of three for the Mike Banning action series.

Who the hell is Mike Banning you might ask.

He’s the Secret Service agent who came to the rescue of the US President when terrorists attacked the White House in the 2013 action thriller Olympus Has Fallen.

It was actually one of two films with similar stories released around the same time in the same year. It happens on occasions and that time the other film was White House Down.

The latter was much goofier and generally preferred by critics and audiences. But Olympus Has Fallen did well enough to spawn two sequels.

Unfortunately, the second film, 2016’s London Has Fallen, was pretty average with a completely unbelievable story (every second cop in London was a terrorist!) and some second-rate visual effects.

Still it made enough money and now we have Angel Has Fallen, again starring Scottish action man Gerard Butler as the veteran Banning.

This time the President, played by Morgan Freeman, is attacked during a fishing trip, leaving him in a coma and all his Secret Service detail, apart from Banning, dead.

The bad guys frame Banning and he’s soon on the run because the still comatose President is unable to vouch for him.

It’s all by the numbers and pretty silly, but Butler makes a good hero and both the action sequences and visual effects are a great improvement on the last film.

The story is predictable and, if you know your typical casting, you can pick the villain very quickly.

But what is inspired is the casting of Nick Nolte as Banning’s father whom our hero turns to for refuge.

Looking like his real-life mug shot from a few years back, Nolte comes across as some kind of benevolent Unabomber and steals pretty much every scene he’s in.

Between the action and Nolte, it’s worth the price of admission.