Angel Has Fallen (2019)

Angel Has Fallen arrives as the third entry in a series that has never pretended to be anything other than a man in a tight shirt running at problems. The plot is sturdy machinery: drones attack a fishing trip, the President lands in a coma, and Secret Service agent Mike Banning spends the remainder of the runtime clearing his name with his fists. The ensemble is notably varied for a 2019 action thriller, with Morgan Freeman in the Oval Office, Jada Pinkett Smith running the FBI manhunt, and Lance Reddick overseeing the Secret Service. None of these arrangements are remarked upon. The film casts capable people and moves on, which is either progress or efficiency depending on the ledger we consult.

The antagonist is a private military contractor who betrays an old comrade for profit, and a sitting Vice President sells out the republic to manufacture a war with Russia. A faint whiff of critique drifts off this, the familiar suspicion that men who monetize conflict may not hold the country's best interests. It never hardens into an argument. The film wants a villain with a corporate letterhead, not an economy to dismantle, and it gets one.

Banning conceals migraines and a back full of old damage from his superiors, while his father, played by Nick Nolte at a volume that suggests structural damage, lives off the grid with a cabin ringed in explosives. These are traits offered as texture, not diagnosis. The picture has no sermon to deliver and no moment where a character turns to the camera to explain the correct position on anything. It is loud, mean-spirited in the way of its genre, and content to remain so. For a trilogy capper that critics met with a shrug, that absence of lecturing is its own modest distinction.