For about a decade there, Gerard Butler was the worst leading man in Hollywood.

This is indisputable. After The Phantom of the Opera stumbled and 300 subsequently provided his breakout, Butler went on an astonishing run of crummy action movies (Olympus Has Fallen), crassly conceived rom-coms (The Ugly Truth), and at least one crummy, crassly-conceived action-rom-com (The Bounty Hunter).

He gave the distinct impression of appearing in good movies exclusively by occasional accident—and that’s exercising some generosity in calling Gods of Egypt a good movie. He even turned Olympus Has Fallen into his signature trilogy of low-rent machismo.

And then, at some point, people decided that they liked him. The Gerard Butler movie became more than just some garbage where Butler would play secret service agent Mike Banning; it’s now practically its own brand.

Hence the marketing of Plane, a movie title so generic that Butler’s star billing feels like a modifier: Get ready to ride Gerard Butler Plane.

To be fair, some audiences must have already cottoned to Butler’s creased handsomeness, brusque manner, and masticating American accent; some of those movies were sizable hits (including Plane, which grossed a little over $12MM at the domestic box office this weekend).

But what explains the critical re-appraisal that now has so many critics genuinely anticipating his next move alongside Butler’s fans?

On paper, it makes sense: Gerard Butler makes a type of movie that a lot of the major studios aren’t especially interested in making at all. (Many of his biggest films have been for mini-major Lionsgate, who by necessity or by design do not have many big-budget franchises to serve as their tentpoles.)

He stars in meat-and-potatoes action movies, thrillers, and potboilers, sometimes sans the potatoes. Movies about cops, criminals, secret service agents, terrorists, and disasters. Dad movies for guys who might not be dads yet.

He has steadfastly avoided superhero movies, and he forms a neat British Isles triangle, repping Scotland opposite Jason Statham’s England and Liam Neeson’s Ireland.

Photo: Everett Collection

In practice, though, Butler has often come across like an unhappy medium, and not just because he glowers through so many of these movies. He doesn’t have Neeson’s actorly cred, no decades of prestige pictures and mentor roles to lend his growling some gravitas; he also lacks the authentic athleticism of Statham at his best.

Butler’s filmography lacks a series as fun as Statham’s Transporter trilogy, or a collaboration as fruitful as Neeson’s with Jaume Collett-Sera; don’t bother asking whether he’s got a genre classic on the level of Snatch or Batman Begins, let alone anything like Schindler’s List or Silence.

A few years ago, Butler did start notching a slightly better class of B-movie. The cultural-critic turning point seems to be Den of Thieves, also known as Dumb Heat, because it’s basically a poor man’s version of that Michael Mann classic—which makes it a fun cops-and-criminals heist picture, with Butler particularly rough around the edges as the kind of cop who eats donuts picked up directly from an active crime scene.

Butler similarly plays up his scraggly shamelessness for the very good Cop Shop, a barely-seen thriller where he plays a hitman whose clash with a con artist finds its way to a police station anchored by a rookie officer (Alexis Louder).

Hell, around this time, Butler even made the only watchable entry in his Fallen series, though this only means that Angel Has Fallen is shlock, instead of hideous-looking and jingoistic shlock.

In Den of Thieves, Cop Shop, and the new Plane, you can catch a gleam of old-fashioned movie-star energy in Butler. None are quite as moody or evocative as any number of classic 1940s noir pictures, but they’ve got more color and flavor than the military-grade gunmetal gray of his worst action movies.

In Plane, his part as a brave commercial airline pilot attempting to protect his passengers while stranded on an island in the Philippines comes across like a warmer, sweeter Liam Neeson—a Neeson character minus the alcoholic backstory and Catholic guilt. What might seem like a lightweight role for Neeson feels comfily rumpled on Butler’s shoulders.

Photo: Everett Collection

Still, Butler’s critical reclamation based just on a few good B-pictures feels a little premature, given the trail of mediocrity and wreckage in his wake. Maybe some of his resurgence has to do with his flexibility.

During the first year-plus of the COVID-19 pandemic, movies were mostly playing on streaming and VOD, and Butler’s contribution to this lineup was Greenland, an unusually grounded (and grim!) apocalyptic disaster movie.

That Butler seems drawn to variations on this particular genre, like the monument-demolishing London Has Fallen or the extreme-weather smash-up Geostorm, once felt retrograde, like he was sifting through a garbage truck full of ’90s blockbuster spare parts.

Suddenly, in the midst of a genuine global disaster, Greenland was surprisingly au courant—and Butler’s career, which often seemed to teeter on the brink of direct-to-video (where a lot of his ’90s predecessors like Bruce Willis, Nicolas Cage, and John Travolta wound up), appeared not marginal but modular.

The downside is that almost any of Butler’s movies, even the better ones, feel like they could have gone direct to streaming. (His last movie before Plane, Last Seen Alive, pretty much did; it came out internationally in 2022 before recently hitting Netflix.)

The upside is that Butler shows up for them; he’s not taking inflated paychecks for glorified cameos or cranking out obscurities in Bulgaria (at least not exclusively). His taste may not be as eclectic as Nicolas Cage’s, but when you’re in need of a January movie like Plane or a plane movie like Angel Has Fallen, he’s there.

I’m still a little mystified by the love for his performances in these movies, which sometimes appear to be actively resisting charisma, as crystallized by his flattened-out American accent.

But during Plane, I found myself giving in to that sense of stability that movie stars offer—the knowledge that Gerard Butler will keep making a certain type of movie, a certain type of way. It’s not true, of course; careers change and end all the time. It’s his job to maintain that illusion. After all, there must be a reason he keeps surviving so many disasters.