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Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine from the great left politics and culture podcast Pod Casty For Me join me for a deep dive into Gerard Butler’s trilogy of Has Fallen thrillers, which chronicle the life and times of Secret Service agent (and American hero) Mike Banning.

We discuss all three entries which span the 2010 decade and fuse meathead action cinema with post 9/11 paranoia and anxieties: Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, one of the two 2013 thrillers about a terrorist attack on the White House, the ultraviolent sequel London Has Fallen, released in the wake of the real life terror attacks in London and Paris, and the best film in the franchise so far, Angel Has Fallen, where a weary Mike Banning has to take on the deep state and evil military contractors who have framed him for an assassination attempt on peacenik President Morgan Freeman, which leads him to have to team up with his estranged dad Nick Nolte, interrupting his Unabomber lifestyle.

Plus: a review of Mike Banning’s classified Secret Service dossier (which I found on the internet), and how excited we all are for the return of Butler’s other iconic screen hero Big Nick O’Brien in next January’s Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.

Follow Pod Casty For Me on Twitter, and you can find out more about the show (and subscribe to their Patreon feed) at their website.

Trailers

Olympus Has Fallen (Antoine Fuqua, 2013)

London Has Fallen (Babak Najafi, 2016)

Angel Has Fallen (Ric Roman Waugh, 2019)

Preview of the 2024 Canal+ streaming series Paris Has Fallen (no Butler in it, though he has a producer credit)