How old does an actor have to be before retiring? I guess the best answer would be "after he's no longer capable of doing his role". In this movie, we've got two perfect examples of this rule – Gerard Butler playing the role of a wheezing Secret Service agent and Morgan Freeman as a decrepit President on the brink of death.
Gerard Butler plays Mike Banning, a Secret Service agent that's been framed by his best friend, Wade Jennings, who runs a private military company. The company's name is "Salient". You really couldn't spell it out any plainer. Both of them seem more fitting in a park playing chess than fighting and stabbing each other. In the end, Mike stabs Wade once and kills him, which I found amusingly fitting. I actually felt Mike could have just shoved him and that would have done it.
Morgan Freeman is Allan Trumbull, a dove who is against needless military action. Of course, this cuts into Wade's profits, who is contacted by the vice president (checks Wikipedia) Martin Kirby to kill the President and frame Mike. There, it's the entire plot.
Some 30 minutes in is when the action starts. The President goes on a fishing trip in the middle of the lake, conveniently away from his agents, who get drone struck and killed, which was appropriately PG-13. Mike takes the President diving and they survive the attack (??). All that attackers had to do was wait for 40 seconds longer and they would have killed the President. Yeah, their plan would have been ruined but it made no sense to kill the entourage and still leave the main target alive.
President is in a coma and Mike, this decades-long protector of the President, comes to handcuffed to a hospital bed. You can imagine the rest: "It wasn't me, I swear!" "We found $10mm on your secret bank account. Confess." He's en route to a prison when Salient soldiers attack his convoy, hack into cars and grab him. He breaks free and starts running from the police. This is when action finally gets exciting, with a nighttime truck chase on a dark, forest road.
Mike goes out to find his dad, Clay, a Vietnam war veteran who's living in a cabin in the woods. This guy is played by NICK NOLTE and delivers an amazing performance. In fact, just drop all the story and have him as the protagonist. The crazy fool is huddled in his cabin to escape Big Brother as he writes his manifesto on a typewriter; Mike even mentions Unabomber. Salient's almighty hackers access Mike's computer and find out he's been trying to locate his dad, who is still receiving social benefits. They find out where Clay lives and a firefight ensues. I guess since Mike could find Clay, so can they.
Clay was a tunnel rat in Vietnam, meaning he dug through half the mountain and rigged it all to explode. He also has nightvision cameras hooked up to his monitors in the cabin. He isn't surprised that armed men are hunting him down; he's been preparing for it all these years. He's really the best character I've seen in a thriller in a while. I'd honestly pay good money just to see a movie starring Clay – he's a rich, layered character with a lot of emotion. Clay abandoned Mike and his mom and there's even a redemption arc for him in the end. Everything regarding Clay brings the entire movie up from "average" to "memorable".
Clay pulls away a tarp to reveal a Chevrolet car and rides with his son. At the gas station, Mike tells his dad that the fight isn't over and Salient will try killing the President, so he has to go to the hospital and try to save him. The moment when Clay stands back and looks down, not knowing how to respond to meeting his son after all these years and then losing him again was so emotional without a single word. Wow, movie, how are you making me feel these things?
We cut to Mike but I was wondering what happened with Clay. He gets a mission too, namely to protect Mike's wife and daughter, Leah and Lynn. Two Salient thugs enter the backdoor to Mike's house and try kidnapping the girls, despite there being a whole lot of reporters and cops just outside the front door. Clay walks in and just straight out kills the fools. Then he reveals some of his non-Vietnam backstory next to the two corpses.
Mike uses his Plot Armor to sneak inside the hospital, take an agent hostage and then surrender himself (?). The President has come to just in time to realize Kirby is now the President and ordered retaliation on Russia. Why Russia? There was a brief mention of "we saw what happened with the elections", alluding at Donald Trump's 2016 win that was falsely connected with Russian involvement. Well, I guess that's enough evidence to attack a nuclear power. Anyway, Allan Trumbull asks for Mike, who tells him Salient will kill him any moment now. How? By rigging the ventilation to seep in gasses to explode, because nobody's watching the ventilation system of the hospital the President's in. The hospital got hacked 6 times that day and the final hack occurs just when Mike arrives, by the way.
So, Mike evacuates the President, who can barely stand. Honestly, in every scene Morgan Freeman is in, he has to be supported by someone or something. To be fair, he is—82 YEARS OLD!? Sorry sir, carry on. The hospital collapses behind them in a terrible CGI explosion, but there's billowing smoke as they enter the shopping mall across the street, a touch of consistency I appreciated. Here's where Mike sets up their last stand, a really cool scene where the few remaining troopers move those massive concrete flower pots to make some cover. Salient troops come in, led by Wade. Mike goes around to flank them, but Salient soldiers thought of it too, so Mike kills them all thanks to his Plot Armor.
Wade's guys finally kill all the remaining troopers, barge into the office cluster they were guarding and find – nothing. Meanwhile, the President is huddled in the office next door, ensuring the soldiers would protect him without revealing his position. Wade stomps out and goes for the rooftop, where a chopper is waiting for him. Mike shows up and blows up the chopper, leading to a quite funny scene that probably references the shootout from the Naked Gun. They struggle for a bit and Wade takes out a knife, which Mike grabs and stabs him in the armpit once. Wade slides to the ground and bleeds out saying, "I'm glad it was you".
You know the rest – Kirby gets caught but probably no harm will come to him, Mike gets reinstated and offered a promotion yadda, yadda. But, what happens with Clay? He stays with Mike's family for a while and is about to walk away again when Leah signals to Mike to ask him to stay. Clay reluctantly agrees and promises to be a better father this time around. There, a redemption character arc! In the post-credits scene, the two go to bond in zero-gravity tanks, where the lights get turned off on them and they freak out.
The drone strike, the nighttime truck chase and the mall shootout are all memorable action scenes but Clay is what makes Angel Has Fallen (2019) so incredible. He's the best character in the entire movie and makes everything he does and says seem believable. His every gesture, every word is infused with such powerful emotions of a man who's been running from his inner demons his entire life. I even remember his wife's maiden name (DeWitt), though it's unrelated to everything else in the movie. When you have a really powerful character, whatever he's saying matters. We latch on to his every word, and you don't need CGI or a big budget. Comedy, action, drama – Clay has shown it all.
The movie also tries to make it seem FBI plays a role, but they're beyond useless so I deliberately didn't mention any of it. This one FBI agent, Helen Thompson, gets shot like a target dummy and dies, with her existence in the movie and death making zero difference. Not just FBI, but the entire Secret Service gets portrayed as headless idiots, apparently because there was no other way to make Mike shine.