Robert Downey, Jr. is right: we need Gerard Butler movies more than ever
The king of January Gerard Butler recalls Tony Stark himself saying we need more Olympus Is Fallens. We can't help but agree.
Aux Features Robert Downey
Welcome to the Gerard-aissance.
After months of confounding theatergoers with posters that simply read “Plane,” Plane, the new January action blockbuster starring who else, Gerard Butler, finally lands in theaters, and the runway is clear. Our dismal movie landscape, in which action, romance, and comedy all get rolled up into Marvel movies, needs Butler’s brand of machismo that straddles the line between sincerity and parody. He hears it all the time.
“Robert Downey Jr. wrote me the nicest email after Olympus Has Fallen,” Butler told Uproxx. “He’s like, ‘We need more of these movies.’ These are the movies, when I was in New York as a kid, and people would shout at the screen and throw things and be like, ‘No!,’ and applaud and cheer… They’re fun. There are reasons that they’ve survived. There are reasons that audiences come out. It’s like you say, it’s a throwback to the ’90s movies where you’re just like, ‘Come on!’”
Robert Downey, Jr. is right. As proven by M3GAN, the hunger for easily digestible genre fare is ravenous. Butler’s been on this. We’re in the middle of the Gerard-aissance, with the actor owning his B-movie charms, imposing frame, and the best five o’clock shadow in the game.
Plane is the tip of the iceberg. In 2018’s Den Of Thieves, Butler revealed himself as one of action cinema’s great scumbags. His character Big Nick enters the movie like a walking crime scene contamination, ready to chew your ass back to county if you don’t watch it. His leather blazer-wearing, donut-chewing Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department detective hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. Big Nick spits out swears like sunflower seeds as Butler’s graying beard catches crumbs for mid-afternoon snacks. Butler brings reality to the role in one of the few movies about the infamously corrupt LA Sherrif’s Department; his sleaze matches the headlines about the LASD.
Channeling Big Nick’s filthy pleasures, Butler brought the same level of spit and sweat to 2021's Copshop, playing hitman Bob Viddick, who has the aesthetic qualities of a mop bucket. While we can’t guarantee that Butler comes to set with his face bruised and battered, his hair greasy and unkempt, and his clothes pulled straight from the bottom of the laundry basket, we wouldn’t be surprised. The grime that Butler slathers over the part is not something we’re getting from Black Adam. He’s genuinely menacing, even when locked up, pushing the one-location shoot-em-up into a tense and memorable good time.
It’s not that Butler’s only good at playing scumbags, but rather that he’s a throwback to ‘90s action movies when anyone could be a superhero, be it the President (Air Force One) or some guy named Jeff who can’t find his wife (Breakdown). With Plane, Butler plays a commercial airline pilot who, in addition to flying an extradited Mike Colter, crashes his plane on an island run by separatists and militias. Even as he goes from flying an airliner to wielding a pistol, there’s an underdog quality that Spider-Man doesn’t offer. Butler gets dirty, bruised, and beat up, so, as Downey points out, people can yell and cheer for his successes and failures. No multiverse can save Gerard Butler. He has to save us.
48 Comments
I have no problem with this.
We’re in the middle of the Gerard-aissanceHe needs to team up with Lee Daniels.
I think it’s totally fine that this middling, mostly fun genre fare exists and that people have a good time watching it. The fact that this article is being written, though, reflects that fact that something is broken in the current movie landscape, and probably that thing begins with an M and rhymes with Marvel.
What’s wrong with marbles?
…Momarvel?
Nah
…Miss Marple?
Yes, Miss Marple!Why did she vanish?And where did Hercule Poirot bury her…?
Marvel is at best a symptom, definitely not a cause. The audience wants what it wants, and what they pay for is big blockbuster experiences. They simply don’t go to the critical darlings, as earlier articles have lamented about. And because those blockbuster experiences cost a lot of money to create, studios need to mitigate risks, which leads to homogenized drizzle, to appeal to as many demographics as possible.
Greenland was way way better than it should have been.
This is the right take.
Copshop was pretty good, Toby Huss stole the show.
Can one steal a show that they own as soon as they sign their contract?
But Frank Grillo was the really greasy one in the movie rather than Butler.
Toby Huss should be in entertainment jail for all the shows he’s stolen.
We already have lots of shitty racist fascist action movies for idiots. That’s basically all marvel churns out these days. We need more Avatars according to moviegoing audiences.
Where are our socially progressive, socialist-leaning action movies for intellectuals?
Avatar movies. Can you read stupid? It was in my original comment.
I certainly can read stupid. It’s why I responded to your comment!
Avatar is a shitty racist action movie for idiots, though maybe not fascist.
You are dumb as fuck if you think Avatar is racist or shitty. James Cameron is a genius.
James Cameron definitely has had his genius moments. But he’s also a racist POS. So, you know, it can be two things.
I’m not the only indigenous person who thinks he’s a racist asshole, I promise you. His biggest fans tend to be white dudes who approve his hierarchical approach to “progressive” goals that always ends with the enlightened white guy in charge. The whole noble savage in touch with nature who teaches the white man the error of his ways so that white dude can now be a great leader is really not great.
You are pretty stupid and racist if you think that is the point of Avatar. Avatar is about capitalism. It has nothing to do with race.
Avatar is about capitalism. It has nothing to do with race.Bro what do you think was the driving force behind the slave trade and driving indigenous people from their land?
I think you’re too stupid to engage with on the modern AV Club, which is saying something. Whatcha gonna do? The contemporary malaise.
Ok stupid. You are a racist moron.
It’s literally the white savior power fantasy. “Thank god military mc white dude showed up to save all of these savages.”
How exactly is “Plane” fascistic
Tells you a lot about Downey that he apparently loves racist fascist movies so much.
Y’all really need to move past this obsession with Marvel.
Bob Odenkirk did Nobody, and I think we need more of those, because John Wick movies seem to take forever, and Liam Neeson is not redoing Taken movies.
I liked the action in Nobody and Bob’s weary delivery. But there was a little too much “manhood = violence” theme pushing for my tastes.
Yeah it kind of straddled the line between parodying that idea and embracing it.
Butler is enjoying a fate I had genuinely hoped would befall ‘The Rock’.I’m not even a big fan of Butler’s but I frankly think, based on acting ability, they deserve one another’s respective careers.
I think they have, actually, had each others’ careers, but in reverse. Butler had “300″ back when the Rock was playing the Tooth Fairy. He got to play Beowulf opposite Angeline Jolie. Opposite trajectories might be the best way to put it, one rising as the other… not falls so much as plateaus? Gerard Butler’s career trajectory looks like an activation energy diagram. There’s this one big peak, but then, the plateau is much higher than the starting point.
For a few years there, UK film critic Mark Kermode and his on-air presenter Simon Mayo gleefully appropriated the nickname a fan’s son gave Butler, “Shutup Buttwad!” That was during the period Butler was professionally faceplanting in misjudged rom-coms like The Ugly Truth, The Bounty Hunter and Playing for Keeps; contemptible thrillers like Gamer, Law Abiding Citizen and London Has Fallen; and cinematic bits of WTF?ery like RocknRolla, Movie 43 and Gods of Egypt. That started to change with Angel has Fallen (where Butler’s Secret Service Agent Mike Banning is framed for the attempted assassination of Morgan Freeman’s President Trumbull, and he and his crazy-coot Vietnam Vet father played by Nick Nolte uncover the truth while on the run), which the popular consensus said was as stupid as the other two films in the series but much more enjoyable, thanks partly to Nolte as Banning Senior. Greenland, an above-average apocalyptic thriller about a planet-killer comet hitting the Earth, continued his career rehabilitation by being both successful during COVID lockdown and well-reviewed.
I think Butler is a better actor (marginally) but The Rock has more charisma, which is hard for me to say because The Rock annoys the fuck out of me. If they could combine into one person it would be perfect.
Times Square audiences, please don’t shout at the screen, and stop picking at that, it’ll just get worse.
“Gerard Plane n Tall”
goddamn did i hate that book
I had forgotten about that book… Wasn’t that the children’s romance novel about mail-order brides? Yes, that was appropriate.
I am 100000% in favor of more big, dumb, mindless action movies like the ones Gerry Butler has been making. Not everything needs to be fine art, and not everything needs to be a horror, and not everything needs to be a superhero movie. Classic ‘80s and ‘90s action movies that are constantly on cable have a special place in my heart. Give me more of them. It’s also why I am a complete sucker for Roland Emerich-type movies, too.
Sometimes these work, but too often they fail hard. I caught most of Greenland on cable recently, and it really sucked. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Yes! More movies that normalize men having to go rogue in extreme situations and using violence to solve problems because institutions and laws and regulations and civility are useless given that all of human existence is a wild, unpredictable, dog-eat-dog jungle of evil-doers and backstabbers! You’re either a lion or a sheep, nothing else! Every man for himself, I always say! And no research, none at all, suggests that these narratives and images foisted on us over and over again are conducive to irrational adherence to ridiculous fears, toxic masculinity, good-guy-with-a-gun fantasies, etc.! So we’re all good!
as long as there’s no more “P.S. I Love You”s
Have you read the book of it? It is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. The movie is bad, no doubt, but the book is 100o times worse. Just…awful. The whole time I was reading I wanted to stop but kept going because I couldn’t believe how bad it was.
I’m not sure we need more movies where Gerard Butler tells random brown people to “go back to Fuckheadistan or wherever you’re from”.