The cheesy male pleasures of Gerard Butler and ‘Kandahar’

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Butler has been making mid-budget, nostalgic action movies so consistently, for so long, that he’s perfected his own formula.

Images and themes from “300” recur in Butler’s films. There is loyalty to the motherland and its defenders, the passing of “respect and honor” from father to son, mild homophobia towards “philosophers and lovers of children” by half-naked alpha males, stoicism, caring women, “merciless” conflicts ” with foreigners, heroic sacrifice, battles of David and Goliath. “I’m just a law-abiding citizen, I’m just a normal guy,” Butler says in “Law abiding citizen,” which came out three years after “300”. In it, an engineer named Clyde Shelton watches his wife and daughter murdered in front of him, but the biggest hurt comes from the justice system, through a prosecutor played by Jamie Foxx. Clyde responds with a bit of slaughter, vowing to bring the entire “sick corrupt temple” on the lawyer’s head: “It’s going to be biblical.”

is the trilogy of “Olympus has fallen,” “London Has Fallen” and “Angel has fallen” with its combined box office of $522 million, that cemented Butler’s mark as the kind of modest action star who has largely disappeared from theaters. In these films, Secret Service agent Mike Banning, increasingly deteriorated over time, protects the president from various expendable terrorists. He runs on barbecue, and then on painkillers, and always ends up battered, coming out into the open propping up a commander-in-chief who says something like: “They came to desecrate our way of life. Dirty our beliefs. It tramples our freedom. And in this, they not only failed, but they gave us the greatest gift: the opportunity for our rebirth.

If this sounds like it sprang from a conservative imagination, well, the franchise’s multicultural thugs and deep state conspiracies would certainly be familiar to that audience. But while Butler is the kind of person who gets invited to the Pentagon to promote a Navy SEAL thriller, her take on these movies is more gritty and prepared. Facing criticism for “London Has Fallen”, argument in the premiere that “It’s about us winning” and “It’s based on heroism and good guys kicking ass.” This pervasive machismo maintains his appeal even as his films become more mainstream, abandoning jingoism for “Angel Has Fallen” or, in 2017. “Geostorm” taking a crazy disaster movie ride. in 2018 “Den of Thieves,” where the masculinity is thick enough to dilute the toxicity, he plays a leather-clad cop who drinks Pepto like whiskey and works to take down some ex-Marines out to rob the Federal Reserve. In “Greenland,” he’s another engineer in another disaster, rushing to get his family into a bunker (and refusing, in individualistic American fashion, to help his neighbors). this january “Plane” it was positively communist by comparison, with the motto “survive together or die alone”. In that one, he is a seasoned commercial pilot in the Air Force whose plane crashes on a Philippine island held by separatists. The obvious conservative themes remain: superiors who can’t be trusted, renegade saviors, barbaric foreigners, but it’s Butler perfect for all audiences, a propulsive popcorn flick with a fair core.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the same guy who’s still disgusting on screen will do the same off screen. Butler hasn’t graced the cover of a mainstream magazine since 2018. He seems to have stung a bit when, in a January interview, Inverse called him “the B-movie king” to his face. He knows that he has a large audience, but I wonder if he knows how much goodwill he has accumulated. In “Kandahar,” he plays an undercover agent exposed by a leak “bigger than Snowden and WikiLeaks combined,” in a script replete with jokes and “free world” aphorisms like “you have to come home to find out what you’re fighting for.” “. But I really got chills at the end, a tearful montage in which the blue-eyed soul of Tom Rhodes’s “Low Tide” plays with blueprints of Butler and the translator of him, finally safe, interspersed with sentimental scenes of loved ones. of the. It’s cheap, but there’s a good heart there, and that’s hard to find these days.