Why do we like Gerard Butler? As of the publishing of this piece, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is performing as expected, looking to become yet another reliable, mid-budgeted programmer hit for the movie star. It’ll round out nicely in theaters, then do well with VOD and home sales. This kind of success is exceedingly rare these days; even Liam Neeson actioners underperform after years of semi-reliability. So: what is it about Butler?
There is a scene somewhere in the middle of Pantera in which “Big Nick” O’Brien (Butler) and Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson) are sitting outside a bar in the south of France, sipping beers on the come down from a night of hard-partying. Los Angeles cop Big Nick has both “gone gangster” and gone international, turning to a life of crime and following Donnie into a heist-laden world of intrigue. The two frenemies proceed to trade monologues that reveal how they wound up on either side of the law. When it’s Butler’s turn, he leans back in his chair, his curly hair pushed back and up as though he’s been struck by lighting in a cartoon, and grunts and chortles out a beautiful, bittersweet memory of his father and the ultimate reason why he became a cop. It’s a fairly mundane story. Yet it works and works well. It feels messy and real.
Gerard Butler feels messy and real. A Scottish rogue who got fired as a lawyer-in-training, moved to London, and eventually scored a plum role in a John Madden movie, he’s been a Hollywood leading man for more than two decades. (Joel Schumacher’s The Phantom of the Opera, anyone? Dracula 2000?) In 2007, Zack Snyder’s 300 would mark Butler’s breakout, a garish epic that features the moment that will most likely lead his obituary. So much of his A-list career appears deeply accidental, as though he’s playing out a real-life, Hollywood-set adaptation of his 2005 indie Dear Frankie. In that lovely little picture, Butler plays a stranger who’s enlisted to pretend to be someone else by a frantic mother (Emily Mortimer), and it works a bit too well. “I feel like I’ve spent most of my career feeling like a total imposter,” Butler once said in a Vanity Fair video interview. He echoes a similar sentiment when reflecting on Phantom: “How the hell did I get here? This is awesome. I can’t even sing!”
Perhaps there is a reason he found his stride making the “wrong place, wrong time, right man” action thriller Olympus Has Fallen in 2013. His modesty is something of a superpower. There is a lovely scene in Rob Bowman’s Reign of Fire where Butler’s Creedy and Christian Bale’s Quinn put on a show for a group of young kids. (They’ve all been forced underground for a generation due to fire-breathing dragons.) The duo performs the climatic scene from The Empire Strikes Back. Creedy, as Luke, play-acts his hand getting sliced off by the lightsaber and the children gasp in horror. He quickly turns to them and breaks character, revealing his hand is okay so they’re not too scared. It’s a small, honest moment: we like this guy and barely know who he is.
A few years back, we recorded a B-Side episode on Butler, focusing on the slew of underseen films that came out right before Olympus Has Fallen. We wrote: “In 2011 & 2012, he released four unsuccessful movies that ran the gamut of available genres: the misguided awards push Machine Gun Preacher, the Ralph Fiennes-directed Coriolanus, the based-on-a-true-story surfer drama Chasing Mavericks, and the soccer rom-com family dramedy Playing For Keeps.”
Coriolanus
The true tragedy in that bunch is Coriolanus, a brazen adaptation of Shakespeare featuring one of Butler’s very best performances. (Fun fact: a staged U.K. production of Coriolanus was among the first gigs he ever booked.) Its overall dismissal foreshadowed Butler’s devotion to action-thrillers, a turn cemented by the surprise success of Olympus Has Fallen. It was around this time that he first read Christian Gudegast’s script for the original Den of Thieves. What followed were two more profitable Fallen films, two high-grossing How to Train Your Dragon sequels, the aforementioned Den of Thieves, and Plane. There were also two underrated, COVID-affected action pictures (CopShop and Greenland) and a couple of big-budget flops (Geostorm and Gods of Egypt, though both performed better overseas). Butler is best as an ordinary man placed in an extraordinary situation––think Harrison Ford in the ’90s with more cigarettes and beer. Speaking of cigarettes: nobody in today’s Hollywood smokes a cigarette on screen better than Butler.
His unassuming nature is both disarming and charming. And he’s clearly grown more comfortable as a performer. In 2023’s Kandahar, Butler plays an exhausted, disenchanted C.I.A. operative. Though the film is fairly derivative, the turn is surprisingly nuanced. Which brings us back to Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. Ethan Vestby gets to the heart of it in his review: “In good form here, Butler nor Jackson Jr. exactly resemble Glen Powell at this point in their lives, and it’s part and parcel of Pantera‘s throwback charms that they’re the kind of rough-hewn protagonists missing from movies these days. Smoking, eating, drinking, and drugging throughout, they’re great company that elevates the proceedings well above soulless genre exercise.”
This is a precarious time in entertainment. Hell: it’s a precarious time, period. Throwback charm goes a long way. Relatability goes a long way. Gerard Butler has both in spades. Soraya Roberts describes it (in her piece “The Campy Masculine Pleasures of Gerard Butler”) better than I ever could: “Butler’s main concern is not necessarily ideological. He’s interested in nobility, loyalty, courage and strength — qualities that, in Hollywood, often manifest in martial form. And it’s through this faithful portrayal of a rumpled-but-honorable masculinity, in rotating all-American settings, that a Scottish dude has become a kind of heartland hero.” In watching Butler, we’re experiencing a nostalgia that never existed. We’re remembering the silver-screen version of a time, place, and feeling that was always a fiction. The reason it works is because Butler makes us believe it, and he cannot believe he’s the one who gets to do it.
Why do we like Gerard Butler? Why not?