Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is back for the third time to save the President of the United States from assassination attempts. Although this time taking a page out of The Fugitive playbook, Mike is actually arrested for the crime and has to break free to prove his innocence and stop the real criminals.

The “Fallen” trilogy seems to be a very unlikely success story. When Olympus Has Fallen was released in 2013 it came out the same year as the larger budget and arguably better White House Down. But the lower budget and more violent approach meant that Olympus was much more profitable and spawned London has Fallen in 2016 and now Angel has Fallen. In that time Morgan Freeman’s character has gone from Speaker of the House, to Vice President and now President in this film. Which is possibly the only reason why there is even a shred of possibility in everyone thinking that Banning might be the bad guy! After all, if you have risked life and limb to save Aaron Eckhart’s president (who does not feature here at all) maybe you might try to kill his successor?

Angel Has Fallen does everything that you expect of it. There are brutal knife and gun fights, car chases, improbably good villains and Gerard Butler swearing his way through it all. The body count is high and whilst the stunt and explosives work is really good when they do lean on computer visual effects the lower budget is very much on show. It seems for every decent action scene there is a slightly choppier one, a fight at night time in the back of a car is pretty much unintelligible for example.

The new additions to the cast are pretty good as well. Nick Nolte shows up as Banning’s dad who he describes as one level off the unabomber and Jada Pinkett Smith appears as a typical hard bitten FBI agent on Banning’s trail. Both are good in slightly underwritten archetype roles. I fear to mention the actors names of the bad guys because anyone who has seen any film with them in will instantly know what their role is, so I will leave it to the first instant you glimpse them on screen! As seasoned villains they perform well.

All in all it is leaps and bounds better than London has Fallen whilst it heads towards a more main stream action movie template.