Tasked with finding — and hopefully rescuing — the crew and passengers of a mysteriously crashed airliner in Plane, the former Special Forces controller (Tony Goldwyn) asks for some information about the plane’s pilot. His answer comes in the form of blurry cellphone video of a certain Captain Brodie Torrance – a hulking brute played by a stubbly Gerard Butler – overpowering a drunk, abusive passenger by putting him in a WWE-style chokehold. The smackdown reportedly went viral, which explains why Captain Brodie was downgraded to flying all over the Pacific on New Year’s Eve in inclement weather. The airline’s publicist is horrified, but Goldwyn’s soldier smiles. “I like this guy.”
It’s a ’90s action movie series, and Butler and his new star vehicle are likable in a ’90s action movie kind of way. Drilling holes in the narrative and dramatic fabrication of a film simply titled Plane is easy enough, starting with the improbability that a staff member could KO a passenger and keep his driver’s license, to the fact that our hero later in is able to hold its own against waves of heavily armed Filipino militiamen trying to turn him and the other crash survivors hostage. Co-written by British spy writer Charles Cumming and directed by French genre specialist Jean-François Richet – best known for remaking John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 – Plane is the kind of film that will build its own credibility (or political correctness) and that doesn’t break a sweat leans into predictability at every turn. For example, guessing that Brodie’s most menacing passenger – the bald, dead-eyed convict (Michael Colter) who is escorted between prisons – isn’t such a bad guy after all, you don’t get points for guessing that, or that the two are destined to become friends stand up together and take out the bad guys commando style. It shouldn’t surprise you either that Brodie is a widower trying to survive the ordeal for his precocious, devoted teenage daughter who only wants her father to come home.
Here’s the thing about clichés: Most of the time, they work. And at 53, Butler has made quite a career out of bending her to his will. In 2019, Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri wrote that the Scottish-born actor — a former law student who burst onto the London theater scene through sheer willpower in the mid-’90s before his breakthrough in Dracula 2000 — “almost single-handedly stayed a very specific kind of.” living film.” While the vast majority of action stars yearn to cross over to other genres, Butler stoically stays on his trail. He’s done the odd romantic comedy, dabbled in historical plays and Shakespeare, and even made a turn as the brooding show tune jukebox in Joel Schumacher’s ill-fated theatrical adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera – an early role that almost torpedoed his momentum before it would have even started. But those outliers aside, Butler has been content to cultivate a very particular sweet spot: a wrinkled, two-fisted charisma reminiscent of a whole host of other names topping the title (Ebiri mentioned Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, and Liam Neeson as analogues) while maintaining a kind of journeyman’s modesty. If he tends to get over the top, it’s usually less from a show-off technique than from a tendency to be cast as short-fuse guys. It’s just fun to watch him go wild.
Case in point: 300, which isn’t exactly an actor’s showcase, but takes cues from Butler’s roaring, abs-first rendition of King Leonidas. In a 2019 video interview with GQ, Butler revealed that his all-caps reading of “THIS IS SPARTA” was a spontaneous instinct and that the instant reaction from his peers was to laugh at it — an anecdote that says something interesting about Butler’s instincts as well as director Zack Snyder’s. The only reason 300 works is because Butler refuses to split hairs between looking intimidating and looking ridiculous; He stylizes himself into special effects in a film that fuses fleshy physicality and soothing CGI at the molecular level. The same goes for 2009’s Gamer, a chillingly uncomfortable and underrated sci-fi satire from filmmaking duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who went on to give Jason Statham the role of a lifetime in Crank, using Butler’s brawler references for a VR theme used variation of The Running Man. Playing a death row inmate who avoids his execution by acting as a “hunter” – a living, breathing human avatar for wealthy online video gamers – Butler demonstrates the intensity necessary to not only survive Neveldine and Taylor’s frenetic editing style, but to ground to walk it too.
Gamer is a hilariously funny film that capitalizes on Butler’s aggravated sense of not delving into the joke, but comedy is in its wheelhouse. While the story hasn’t fully redeemed the infamous 2013 all-star comics anthology film Movie 43 — a multiple Razzie winner and eagerly dunked by mainstream critics like Richard Roeper — it does have some insanely good parts, including the one about a Pair of roommates (Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott) who catch a foul-mouthed goblin and elicit the (first verbal, then physical) wrath of his twin brother; both goblins are played by Butler in a profane tour de force. The part titled “Happy Birthday” never goes beyond the one-joke premise of a miniaturized butler spewing out four-letter words in a thick Highlands brogue, but it doesn’t have to because the one joke is so powerful: Humor is subjective, but a two-foot-tall Gerard Butler leaping out of a pot of gold and firing two revolvers while begging his rivals to taste his Celtic steel is universal language.
The same year as Movie 43, Butler starred in Olympus Has Fallen, one of two contemporaneous thrillers about a terrorist invasion of the White House. While Roland Emmerich’s White House Down was an insane Obama-era fantasy in which Jamie Foxx as the African American POTUS defended his turf from white nationalists and state defectors, Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen drew on ’80s xenophobia and set im Essentially a re-staging of Red Dawn with North Korea instead of the USSR. Meanwhile, Butler’s character, Mike Banning, is a spiritual descendant of In the Line of Fire’s Clint Eastwood, a disgraced Secret Service agent seeking redemption. He finds it by becoming a Beltway version of John McClane, taking down bad guys in increasingly brutal ways. “I’ll stick my knife through your brain,” he promises the main villain; Suffice it to say that regardless of his other virtues, Olympus Has Fallen ensures that his hero remains a man of his word.
Granted, Mike Banning isn’t a household name like John McClane or Jack Ryan, but Butler has clung hard on two sequels: London Has Fallen (guess where it’s set) and Angel Has Fallen, which cemented its place in the Grizzled-male canon binding melodramas by casting none other than Nick Nolte as the star’s estranged father, resulting in unprecedented testosterone levels. As a paycheck, the Fallen movies are steady stuff, but as far as really big roles go, Butler’s claim to the 2018 action film Valhalla lies in Den of Thieves, aptly described by The Ringer’s Shea Serrano as an “underrated heist-movie masterpiece,” and , at a very different point on the cinephile spectrum, praised by German auteur Christian Petzold, who claimed he even preferred it to Heat.
With apologies to Petzold, Den of Thieves isn’t a better movie than Heat – it’s more like the We Have Food at Home version of Heat. That’s a compliment, by the way: Just because director Christian Gudegast isn’t Michael Mann doesn’t mean he’s not fun to watch as he does his best while Butler – cast as a cocky, ethically flexible Major Crimes Unit investigator named “Big” Nick O’Brien – claws in the same stratosphere as Denzel Washington in Training Day. There’s a shade of gray to storytelling in Den of Thieves that shouldn’t be underestimated. While Butler is technically the film’s protagonist – a master at taking down violent bank robbers – he’s also borderline monstrous in a way that makes us genuinely uncomfortable, only he’s so compelling that he keeps winning us back. He’s pumped and collapsed behind tired eyes, and his rhythms are so unpredictable that Den of Thieves keeps culminating in what another film might waste as downtime — take, for example, the scene where a drunk, argumentative Nick dies His wife’s dinner party interrupts them to sign their divorce papers. The way Butler modulates the tone between menacing comedy and genuine pathos — like when he addresses his ex’s new boyfriend about the consequences of associating with his daughters — is impressive, while Nick’s final gesture links him with his frightened beta male -Hugging Quarry, impressive is as perfectly executed as his sarcastic, self-harming, smiley farewell line to guests: “Call the fucking cops.”
There is no equivalent highlight in Plane and not much shading in the character of Captain Brodie Torrance. Once we realize that he’s a tough, solid, and dependable guy – that he’s basically there to be liked – all we have to do is sit back and let Butler do his thing. Still, a few moments stand out and interrupt the film’s passive, generic joys. In one instance, after being ambushed by a gunman in an abandoned warehouse, Brodie must put on a deadly headlock – a little choreography that evokes and doubles his work snafu from long ago. Butler straightens up and looks genuinely dazed and confused at having taken a life, a small admission of mortality in a film that has an exponentially increasing death toll. In another, we see a bleeding, battered Brodie asking for a minute’s respite after an unlikely but successful Hail Mary plan to save the lives of those around him. When he finally sits down, it is with the difficulty of a man who nurses serious injuries but also quietly basks in the satisfaction of a job well done. It’s a moment of quiet dignity, one that gives Plane a final shot worthy of its star.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
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