Gerard Butler discusses his most harshly treated movie: “People didn’t really get it”
It’s a bit of a shame that Gerard Butler has just decided he doesn’t fancy making a sequel to Plane, his 2023 action thriller that saw him pilot an airliner into the jungle, then have to fight his way out of it, because it was actually very good, much better than that kind of film has any right to be, really.
But then Butler has carved out a bit of a niche making action thrillers that you’d usually find several metres deep on a Netflix scroll, except that like Plane, and especially Den of Thieves, you come away from them thinking, ‘OK, I’d like some more of that please, Gerard’.
Speaking of Den of Thieves, that was one of the Scottish actor’s movies that did indeed get a well-deserved sequel, and it’s one of the finest ‘down on his luck cop takes on an army of bad guys’ films in the past ten years, one you can file alongside the equally brilliant Rebel Ridge from 2024.
Don’t believe what the critics’ side of Rotten Tomatoes might tell you, Den of Thieves races along for two hours and 20 minutes as Butler’s alcoholic, gun-happy detective leads his elite sheriff’s department unit nicknamed ‘The Regulators’ against vicious gangland drug dealers, breaking all kinds of rules and limbs in the process. A similarly effective sequel followed last year and went down even better than the first, and the actor is definitely having something of a revival after he experienced a career high in the mid-2000s, finding fame as the muscle-bound, blood-soaked Leonidas in Zack Snyder’s brilliantly gruesome comic book movie 300 back in 2006.
That brought in almost half a billion dollars at the box office and squarely placed the Scot in that enviable position of being an actor that men wanted to be like and women wanted to get with, something he made the most of by signing up for the romantic comedy PS I Love You, which I turned off after a record three and a half minutes but other folk seemed to enjoy.
He followed that up with a Jodie Foster movie, the family fantasy Nim’s Island, which garnered mixed feedback, and then took the lead in a Guy Ritchie effort, 2008’s RocknRolla, which did OK but wasn’t anything to write home about despite being envisaged as a spiritual successor to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Then came a movie in 2009 that Butler had high hopes for, the futuristic sci-fi shoot-em-up Gamer, co-starring Dexter’s Michael C Hall and Terry Crews. Pitting death row inmates against each other in a deadly battle controlled by video game players, the premise seemed interesting enough, but the end product left plenty to be desired, and it made a big loss at the box office amidst poor reviews.
He was disappointed by the performance and told UniLad some years later, “I was hoping it was of the time, that people would get it. I thought it was genius. It could have been executed slightly differently, but I really loved the commentary it was making on where the world was going, especially in gaming and sort of losing ourselves into that world, and technology and man bonding with machine.”
Much as the word genius is branded around these days in situations that don’t merit it, like this one, he probably has a point about technology and man becoming evermore conjoined, but that’s about it.
He continued, “I didn’t feel people really did get it at the time. It didn’t do amazing business. It has become a bit of a cult classic, but I didn’t know about this resurgence”.
While we won’t see a sequel to Plane, Butler did make another Greenland, his 2020 comet disaster movie, which was released earlier this year, plus he’ll be doing his usual voiceover duties for How to Train Your Dragon 2 later in 2026.
