** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 669 10 March 2016 LONDON HAS FALLEN

THE MOVIE 'LONDON HAS FALLEN' HAS UPSET CRITICS. YET IT IS NOT ISLAMOPHOBIC. AND ITS FINAL MESSAGE IS A HEART-WARMING ONE.
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Hitler’s Luftwaffe didn’t make it to bring plucky London to its knees. Neither do the marauding terrorists of ‘London has fallen’ but they shake it up a bit. The sods blow up Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, Chelsea Bridge, St Paul’s, etcetera. Also, they murder the visiting leaders of Germany, France, Japan and Italy into the bargain. Oh, yes, including the British PM. Poisoned before the attacks, his funeral craftily designed to draw the world’s big cheeses to London. But the US President is a harder nut to crack. Because he has super-tough, invulnerable agent Gerald Butler to protect him.

London Has Fallen is a hugely enjoyable movie. Kept the priest on the edge of the seat nearly from beginning to end. Why did many spiteful critics pan it? The fear factor, I guess. They could not bear to behold terrorists so lethally successful for most of the action. Viewing the icons of a famed megalopolis of the Western world crumbling into smithereens…too much! Does superstition play a part, I wonder? Maybe scribblers believe in the apotropaic force of a bad review – its power to avert possible evil or bad luck. With the current level of terrorist threat estimated as ‘severe’, i.e. an attack is highly likely, can you blame them? Yet the film is an irresistible, gutsy romp.

One critic has spoken of xenophobia, another of racism. Because some of the bad guys look like brown people? (Mostly Bulgarian actors, actually.) But one thing London Has Fallen is not is Islamophobic. The chief villain, Amir Barkawi – played by an Israeli! - is Pakistani and hides in Yemen but he isn’t affiliated to ISIS or al-Qaeda. Islamist ideology does not motivate him. Instead, he is an arms dealer. OK, he thirsts for revenge because a US drone strike accidentally killed his daughter – still, he is not fighting a jihad against the infidels. As all merchants of death, he is in it strictly for the money, period.

Barkawi’s figure in fact harks back to historical characters like the notorious ‘Armament King’ Sir Basil Zaharoff. A shady Greek arms dealer and industrialist before and after WWI. Accumulated a huge fortune by selling weapons to opposing sides in conflicts. Utterly unscrupulous, he sold arms impartially to both Greeks and Turks, Germans and French. Ever since Zaharoff many on the Left have naively believed that it is the merchants of death that cause wars. Fiddlesticks! They only take advantage of the financial opportunities, methinks.

Dragged along passively like a valise by bodyguard Butler, the US President most of the time looks like a wimp. He picks up mettle when, captive and bound, he is brutally punched, the whole world watching online. Thereupon he stoically recites some verbiage from the American Constitution – his moment of glory. But his real apotheosis is when he finds it in himself to shoot dead a baddie about to kill his minder. Although not as ferociously cock-a-hoop as another President memorably played by Donald Pleasance in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, as he gleefully pumps bullets into his erstwhile tormentor, this POTUS alludes to the grim truth of a primitive tribal belief. You can’t call yourself a man until you have killed your first man.

Since he played immortal Spartan hero Leonidas in 300, I have been a big fan of Gerald Butler. A real Mensch. What do I say to those upset by some of the violence he inflicts on the enemy? When, for example, he twists the knife with relish into the boss terrorist’s brother, as the latter hears his sibling’s death rattle on the mobile? Definitely not nice but…’a la guerre comme a la guerre’, as the French say. You don’t deter appalling terrorists with cups of tea or pious homilies, do you?

I imagine Butler’s agent is a piece of wish-fulfilment. In the real world CIA or FBI spooks must operate under sundry restrictions concerning human rights, prohibitions against torture and the like. Fine, necessary, civilised stuff. From time to time though the secret guys might desire to be untrammelled by lawful constraints – being free to be bloody bastards like Gerald Butler!

Could London, my beloved London, really fall? Allahu a’alam, God knows. I hope and pray it won’t. (Unless those stinkers, the big banks manage it…) Anyway, our home spies have their eyes wide open, believe you me. The only thing to fear is fear itself. But, in the unlikely event, the advice of an expert I listened to recently is golden: ‘run, hide and tell’. Heartening, eh?

Terrorism is depressingly said to be a sexy subject. That is why the media love scaring us by blabbing about it 24 hours a day. Mercifully, London Has Fallen lacks the usual, dreary scenes of fornication. Instead, the ending shows the hero, like Homer’s Odysseus, returning home unscathed to his family - his loving wife and new born child. The blessing of having a spouse, children – a family: that is perhaps this violent movie’s enduring message.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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