Driftsprint

By Alex Kirschenbaum

Contributing Entertainment Writer

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Gerard Butler feels like the movie star equivalent of Joe Johnson: blessed with sneaky steadiness and longevity, not particularly showy, able to stand out in various environments, but also an under-the-radar seven-time All-Star who gets shortlisted for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as soon as he’s eligible.

At least, the quiet quality is Butler's talk-show/PR persona. On screen, Butler revels in going over the top.

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Since his 2007 breakout as a doomed beefcake in Zack Snyder’s slow-motion-heavy extravaganza 300, the Scotsman has been a ubiquitous fixture in the movies.

Butler’s latest, Greenland 2: Migration, has gotten off to a rocky start domestically, having landed in fifth place during its debut this past weekend with an $8.4 million take. The pricey Lionsgate/STX co-production may need to rely on its overseas box office to earn back its alleged $90 million budget.

The apocalyptic thriller has also been off to an iffy start with critics, earning a middling 52 percent aggregate critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In fairness, Butler movies aren’t necessarily designed for rave reviews — they’re generally built to be fairly broad. Greenland 2 is just Butler’s latest bid to create a franchise. He’s made four How to Train Your Dragon films (three animated, the latest a live-action reboot of the original), capitalizing on his signature brogue. Butler has also starred in three …Has Fallen films and two Den of Thieves caper adventures — so far.

Butler is a bit of a throwback star. After 300, he initially churned out a slew of romances and romantic comedies, before recentering retro action movies as his priority.

Will Greenland 2 number among his best five movies when the dust settles and this writer finally sees it? Time will tell.

Until then, here are his top five flicks.

...

5. Angel Has Fallen (2019)

Butler’s third stint as the world’s greatest Secret Service Agent, Mike Banning, might just be his best. When President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman, earning a promotion from his role as VP to Aaron Eckhart’s Benjamin Asher in the prior two …Has Fallen movies) and his security detail — including Banning — are beset by drones on a fishing trip, Banning is accused of masterminding the attempted assassination. He finds himself on the run, eventually enlisting his estranged Vietnam veteran dad (Nick Nolte) to help him evade capture long enough to determine who set him up.

Where the original Olympus Has Fallen was essentially Die Hard in the White House and its sequel London Has Fallen felt a bit like Independence Day with Terrorists, Angel Has Fallen grafted the classic “falsely accused man” scenario onto the Banning formula, making something of a mash-up of Shooter, Mission: Impossible, North by Northwest, The Package and The Fugitive.

4. 300 (2007)

Butler typically likes to run the show as the marquee name above the title on most of his movies. But he thrives as part of a team. 300 resonated beyond its wild visuals thanks in large part to Butler's chemistry with his fellow Spartans David Wenham, Vincent Regan, Michael Fassbender and others.

Director Snyder, who cut his teeth in the world of big-budget commercials, has always relished pushing the envelope with stylistic flourishes — frenetic camerawork, wild color grading, off-kilter speed-ramping. He’s reigned himself in a bit across the past decade-plus, but this era saw him at perhaps his Synder-iest.

3. Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

A deeply insane thrill ride from F. Gary Gray, where Gerard Butler chews all the scenery as an aggrieved family man driven to homicidal mania after witnessing the murders of his wife and daughter — and watching, helplessly, as his plea-dealing lawyer lets one of the killers off with a fairly light five-year sentence.

Butler, playing a rare post-stardom villain role, manages to somehow earn our sympathies for a lot of this flick’s run time, despite an increasingly disturbing run of intricately planned murders. Butler channels John Malkovich's Cyrus the Virus, Tobin Bell’s Jigsaw, Heath Ledger’s Joker and Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter here, channeled through the self-righteous rage of Liam Neeson's Bryan Mills. With multiple Oscar winners in Jamie Foxx and Viola Davis — plus seasoned vets like Bruce McGill, Regina Hall and Colm Meaney submitting quality support — an unleashed Butler manages to somehow ground the chaos with measured intensity.

2. Greenland (2020)

In the original Greenland, structural engineer John Garrity (Butler) and his family find themselves specially selected by the Department of Homeland Security to survive an impending comet collision expected to vaporize most of the planet. They head for underground bunkers in Greenland that are designed to house a lucky few — invariably, complications arise.

By the point Greenland hit screens in late 2020 (during the start of a global pandemic, speaking of unfortunate apocalyptic serendipity), Butler had already mastered the old-school actioner with a slew of ridiculously rewatchable, fairly low-stakes (compared to, say, MCU extravaganzas) throwback flicks that got a lot of their kicks from physical stunts and special effects work rather than too-slick CGI. Now, Butler was tackling another familiar form: the old-school survivalist disaster adventure.

Although the digital graphics are a bigger point of emphasis and the practical stuntwork is more subdued, Greenland is still charmingly retro. The movie harkens back to ’70s classics like Earthquake and The Poseidon Adventure, plus ’90s/early-2000s prime-Roland Emmerich movies. Butler, by this point in his early 50s, remains a commanding presence, but is clearly trying to transition to less physically taxing work. But don’t worry, John Garrity does plenty of running and punching.

1. Den of Thieves (2018)

Butler has never shied away from his influences.

Den of Thieves is his Heat, with sprinklings of an Ocean’s Eleven-style caper and a The French Connection-type grizzled cop actioner thrown in for good measure. In the first Christian Gudegast bank heist thriller (with Atlanta standing for Los Angeles), we track the intersecting adventures of two crews: our hero LASD Major Crimes investigators, and our titular ex-military thieves with a code.

Butler’s beleaguered, perpetually hungover Detective “Big” Nick O'Brien certainly draws elements from John McClane and Vincent Hanna: he’s a divorced, cigarette-chomping, alcoholic loose cannon who plays by his own rules. Big Nick will happily eat a possibly blood-speckled crime scene donut, guzzle whole milk straight from the carton, accidentally have a one-night stand with the stripper girlfriend of the crook he’s been staking out, humiliate his ex-wife’s new beau, and get into a very weird off-duty confrontation with that crook and his entourage at a Benihana. In the wrong hands, the character risks descending into self-parody, but Butler reins him in through sheer force of personality.

As the leaders of the crook crew, Pablo Schreiber and Curtis "50 Cent” Jackson emerge as terrific, empathetic foils for Big Nick. Memorable adversaries are a staple of the best Butler movies, and Schreiber and Jackson are perhaps the two unnuanced best.

Den of Thieves may have been affectionately received by critics and a sleeper hit with audiences when it was first unleashed on unsuspecting crowds as January box office counterprogramming in 2018 — but it’s now a borderline cult classic, thanks to a long tail on home video and streaming. It’s been the subject of numerous devout thinkpieces and multiple Rewatchables podcast episodes. It is Butler’s crowning achievement to date, a rollicking good time that rewards repeat viewings.

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