Robert Downey, Jr. is right: we need Gerard Butler movies more than ever

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.