Gerard Butler
This! Is! A long way from Sparta! Thirteen years after 300, should the Scottish action star ease off the B-grade argy bargy?
Way back in The Cradle
Of Life, angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft made Gerard Butler’s rogue agent Terry Sheridan an offer he couldn’t refuse. Gerry-Terry even paused his peculiar prison workout to process Croft’s pitch: in exchange for helping her, she would have his dodgy record expunged and his citizenship restored.
Sixteen years and a few Razzie noms later, Butler’s screen record seems to call for its own restorative. Between his dubious …Has Fallen series and sundry knock-offs of bigger films, he has become synonymous with a lesser exchange: that of well-defined musculature for a career defined by choppy reviews and diminished returns.
Things looked different back in, ooh, 480BC. Boasting abs you could carve a steak on without leaving knife marks, Butler bellowed his way to stardom in Zack Snyder’s 300. A lapsed lawyer, he came late-ish to acting but worked his way up to 300-decibel Spartan infamy across a broad genre spread. After his debut in Mrs. Brown, he banked a bit-part in Tomorrow Never Dies, tried surrogate parenting in Dear Frankie, sucked blood in Dracula 2001, sang in Phantom Of The Opera and faced dragons in Reign Of Fire. His early strike rate was inconsistent, but at least he tested his range.
He challenged himself for a while post-300, too, only to butt up against his limitations and a few unfortunate career choices. The man’s-man aura wore thin in romcoms The Ugly Truth and
The Bounty Hunter, then thinner again in Death Wish throwback Law Abiding Citizen. He revisited an old stage peak in Coriolanus, but lumbered through trash-grade riffs on superior films:
Gods Of Egypt was 300 diminished, Geostorm the diet Day After Tomorrow, Den Of Thieves a tepid-at-best Heat.
As for the ludicrous (knowingly, but still) …Fallen franchise, his craggy presence and commitment to the action could use more flavour: a bit of Statham’s power-eyebrow, say, or Cage’s mania.
Butler’s biggest success remains the How To Train Your Dragon trilogy, where he voiced Stoick the Vast. Of his recent screen roles, a newfound restraint distinguishes a couple of below-radar outings: submarine drama Hunter Killer, lighthouse drama The Vanishing. Could the latter be “his reinvention”, as The Times argued? That remains to be seen, but an exchange of bludgeoning machismo for a quieter kind of reserve might help light one way forward. KH