[COLUMN] Gerard Butler, Our Meathead Poet Laureate | by Darren Mooney

January has come and gone. This is always a tough time for a culture writer, allowing for awards contenders like The Brutalist and A Complete Unknown, as mainstream cinema works through the doldrums of “Dumpuary.” For better or worse, at least next week any pop culture commentator knows that they will have to engage with either Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy or Captain America: Brave New World.

Still, there is something instructive in looking to the margins of mainstream movie-going. What films exist at the outer limits of public consciousness, in the long barren stretch between the tail end of awards season and the increasingly early dawn of the summer blockbuster season? It is worth taking a moment to celebrate these films, and perhaps to reflect upon a figure who feels like their patron saint. Like a lonely sentinel, Gerard Butler stands guard at the fringes of blockbuster cinema.

Butler’s recent vehicles tend to open in October, like Geostorm (2017) or Hunter Killer (2018), or January, like Den of Thieves (2018), Plane (2023) and Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (2025). Occasionally, he’ll get adventurous and open a movie like Greenland in December 2020. He’ll also split the difference; Copshop opened limited in September 2021, but hit Netflix worldwide in January 2022. Last Seen Alive had a small theatrical release in July 2022, but broke out on Netflix that October.

Butler is an interesting figure in the context of the modern theatrical landscape. The actor has his franchises. He is a fixture of the How to Train Your Dragon movies, and will reprise his role as Stoick the Vast in the live action remake, but those aren’t his movies. Butler is positioned as an elder statesman. That said, there have been recent attempts to franchise Butler’s more successful films. Den of Thieves just got a sequel, while a Greenland sequel is due sometime later this year. He made three Fallen films.

However, Butler doesn’t really have his own mega-franchise, often working with smaller studios like Lionsgate. He’s never been folded in as a lead into a long-running film series like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He has yet to cross paths with Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) in the Fast and Furious franchise or lead an expedition to Isla Nublar in a Jurassic Park sequel. He doesn’t have his own bespoke star-driven franchise like Tom Cruise does with Mission: Impossible. Butler is the kind of star who doesn’t really exist anymore.

In the early stages of his stardom, following his breakout success in 300, Butler just seemed like a fairly generic leading man. It could often feel like Butler was the fifth name on the list of potential male leads, oddly enough behind Matthew McConaughey. Although somewhat forgotten now, Butler’s early career involved a lot of romantic comedies: P.S. I Love You with Hilary Swank, The Ugly Truth with Katherine Heigl, The Bounty Hunter with Jennifer Aniston.

To put it simply, for a little while, Butler was just a guy who was in stuff. While Butler undoubtedly had a distinctive screen persona – something of a “man’s man” who oozed a rugged Scottish masculinity – but the truth is that his filmography was reasonably varied. Butler could do anything that was asked of him. He was rarely in the best example of a given genre, but audiences could usually find him two or three shelves down in the local video store in some loose approximation of the kind of movie that they actually wanted to see.

As such, Butler made his share of generic and forgettable action movies like RocknRolla or Gamer. He headlined his own take on a family movie with Nim’s Island. He even starred in his own version of middle-brow awards fare, like Machine Gun Preacher and Chasing Mavericks. Throughout this stage of his career, much like Butler seemed like the actor that a producer eventually hired if their four other choices weren’t available or were outside the budget, Butler’s movies always seemed like the “value pack” equivalent to better films.

Sometimes, this comparison could be very literal, as if Butler weren’t just starring in the second-tier version of a particular kind of film, but starring in the non-brand equivalent of a specific movie. Law Abiding Citizen, for example, feels a lot like a version of The Dark Knight without Batman (Christian Bale). A Family Man felt like a riff on the Nicolas Cage vehicle The Weather Man. Gods of Egypt feels like a knock-off of Butler’s own breakout hit, 300.

This is not to suggest any intentionality or cynicism on Butler’s part. It is just how moviemaking used to work. The success of Quentin Tarantino in the early 1990s led to a wave of studio movies emulating his style and aesthetic to varying degrees of success and acclaim: Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead, Suicide Kings, Go!, The Boondock Saints. There were enough different types of movies that it didn’t matter if one or two of them were similar enough in concept. Studio filmmaking was not quite so homogenized.

Indeed, Butler arguably got to be on the right side of such a comparison with Olympus Has Fallen, his White-House-under-siege film which was released four months before Roland Emmerich’s starrier and bigger-budget White House Down. Indeed, while Olympus Has Fallen grossed less than White House Down, it also cost significantly less. As such, it spawned two sequels. In this way, Butler’s willingness to work on lower-budget films from smaller studios allowed him to keep making these kinds of projects for longer than most.

That’s what’s really interesting about Butler. He was resilient. While Hollywood changed, Butler remained in place, in part because he was always at the margins. Most of his recent projects feel like cheap-and-dirty versions of better and older movies. To pick two obvious examples, both Geostorm and Greenland are throwbacks to the big disaster movies of the late 1990s: Independence Day, Volcano, Dante’s Peak, Armageddon and so on. They were certainly more satisfying than Roland Emmerich’s return to the genre in Moonfall.

Critic Sonny Bunch neatly distilled the appeal of Den of Thieves as “Meathead Heat”, in reference to Michael Mann’s Los Angeles bank robbery classic. It is easy for this to sound pejorative, but it’s really just descriptive. It illustrates the lane in which Butler is working, making a stripped-down, enjoyable and straightforward take on a genuine cable classic. By that metric, Copshop might be understood as “Meathead Assault on Precinct 13.”

This is the sweet spot for modern Gerard Butler. Critic Bilge Ebiri described Den of Thieves 2: Pantera as “a meathead remake of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice”, and it’s an entirely accurate descriptor. If Detective “Sonny” Crockett (Colin Farrell) was “a fiend for mojitos”, one gets the sense that Detective “Big Nick” O’Brien (Butler) is a fiend for red bull and vodka. Pantera is surprisingly endearing in its commitment to a meathead meditation on Mann’s existential musing.

In his own way, Big Nick wrestles with the philosophical complexity of the blurred boundaries between cop and criminal. “You and I are part of this weird symbiosis,” he opines to career criminal Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.). “See, you only exist, fraulein, because of me. If we weren’t there trying to stop you from smuggling shit and stealing shit, then your shit wouldn’t be worth a fucking thing. It’s only worth the trouble, because we’re there trying to stop you.” Big Nick is a big thinker.

There is something undeniably charming in this, to the point that one wants the Den of Thieves franchise to continue in perpetuity making college dorm riffs on Michael Mann movies: Big Nick and Donnie team up with an investigative podcast to take down “Big Vape”; Donnie drives an Uber for a trained assassin; Big Nick goes undercover managing Lamborghini in the hopes of leading their team to glory in a Miami drag race while exploring the complexities of the human heart.

This might sound dismissive or ironic, but it’s oddly charming to watch a movie like Den of Thieves riffing on Heat or Copshop drawing from Assault on Precinct 13 or Pantera evoking Miami Vice. Pablo Picasso joked that “good artists borrow; great artists steal.” There is something to be said for taking a concept that already worked and just layering a new engine on top of it without any pretension or unearned self-importance. For better or worse, Gerard Butler movies know what they are and do what they promise.

Although it can be hard to quantify such things, it seems like there is a growing cultural appreciation for Butler and the kinds of movies that he makes. The reviews for Pantera were appreciably stronger than the reviews for Den of Thieves had been five years earlier. Greenland opened to much stronger reviews than Geostorm, three years prior. Plane and Copshop both opened to strong reviews, compared to earlier Butler vehicles like London Has Fallen or Machine Gun Preacher.

In some ways, Gerard Butler’s time has come. The actor has remained unmoving as the entire Hollywood ecosystem shifted around him. When he first emerged, Butler felt like the third choice to play the lead in a second-rate version of the tenth most popular film of a given year. His early projects felt like the cheaper imitation of a product that wasn’t especially prestigious to begin with. As such, the comparisons rarely flattered Butler or his projects.

It was very easy to hate PS I Love You, The Ugly Truth and The Bounty Hunter when they were in competition with higher thread count romantic comedies like Crazy Stupid Love, Forgetting Sarah Marshall or Enough Said. It was reasonable to be dismissive of the Fallen trilogy back when the major studios were routinely releasing movies like Unstoppable. Any direct comparison to the high or median quality movie in a particular space often found Butler’s projects wanting.

However, as the major studios have all but abandoned mid-budget adult-skewing crowd-pleasing fare, Butler’s projects have gone from competing with the gold standard to being the only options available. If the audience wants to see a movie like Assault on Precinct 13, itself an archetypal film template dating back to Rio Bravo, there aren’t too many alternatives to Copshop. If a viewer wants to watch something like a Michael Mann movie, the Den of Thieves films are the choice by default.

On some level, this is perhaps a depressing observation about the state of modern mainstream cinema, and how tightly the cinematic middle has been squeezed by the rush for supersized franchise blockbusters and low-budget horror. However, this perhaps speaks to Butler’s increasing appeal. Guarding the borders of blockbuster season, Gerard Butler has emerged as king of the proverbial waste land.

To shift the meathead metaphor from Eliot to Milton, the actor has chosen to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven. It feels only appropriate for an actor playing Big Nick.