Butler has been steadily making nostalgic mid-budget action movies for so long that he’s perfected his own formula.
The images and themes of “300” are repeated throughout Butler’s films. Loyalty to the motherland and its defenders, inheritance of “respect and honor” from father to son, soft homophobia against “philosophers and boy lovers” by half-naked alpha males, stoicism, female upbringing, ” There is no mercy” conflict. A foreigner, a heroic sacrifice, a battle between David and Goliath. “I’m just a law-abiding citizen. I’m just an ordinary man,” Butler said in Law-Abiding Citizen, published three years after 300. In the film, an engineer named Clyde Shelton sees his wife and daughter killed before his eyes, but the biggest wound comes from the judicial system, played by Jamie Foxx. Clyde responds with a bit of slaughter, vowing to knock the whole “sick and corrupt temple” down on the lawyer’s head – “it will be biblical.”
A trilogy of “Olympus Has Fallen,” “London Has Fallen,” and “Angel Has Fallen.” It cemented Butler’s brand as a star. In these films, Secret Service agent Mike Banning becomes increasingly broken over time, protecting the president from various disposable terrorists. He eats steak, then runs on painkillers, and at the end is always battered and emerges into the light holding up the commander-in-chief who says things like: Betray our beliefs. trample our freedom. And in this regard, not only did they fail, they gave us the greatest gift of all: a chance to be reborn. “
Even if this sounds like something born out of a conservative imagination, the series’ multicultural rogues and Deep State conspiracies will certainly be familiar to its audience. But Butler is the sort of person who gets invited to the Pentagon to promote thriller movies about the Navy Seals, but his stance on those movies is rougher and more prepared. Face criticism for ‘London has fallen’ he argued At the premiere, he said, “This is about us winning,” and “based on heroism and kicking the butts of good people.” This generalized masculinity continues even as his films lean toward the mainstream, such as abandoning patriotism in Fallen Angels or piggybacking on the cuckoo disaster film in 2017’s Geostorm. Yet it retains its charm. In 2018’s Den of Thieves, a leather-clad cop cracks down on ex-Marines who drink Pepto like whiskey just enough to make their masculinity less toxic. is playing In “Greenland,” he’s another disaster-stricken engineer who rushes to take his family to a bunker (and, in American individualistic fashion, to dispose of his neighbors). refusing to help). By comparison, this January’s Plane was aggressively communist, with the catchphrase “Survive together or die alone.” In it, he is a civilian pilot from the Air Force whose jet crashes on a separatist-occupied island in the Philippines. The obvious conservative themes of unreliable superiors, rebel saviors, and barbaric aliens remain, but for all audiences, The Butler is the perfect, propulsive popcorn movie with a core of justice. is.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that the same man who continues to mutiny onscreen will do the same offscreen. Butler hasn’t graced the cover of a mainstream magazine since 2018. He seems a little smarter. in an interview in January, Inverse called him to his face “the king of B-movies.” He knows he has a large audience, but is he well aware of how much goodwill he has amassed? In “Kandahar,” he plays a secret agent exposed in a leak “bigger than Mr. Snowden and WikiLeaks combined,” and the script is packed with “free world” jokes and aphorisms. But the blue-eyed soul of Tom Rose’s “Low Tide” is superimposed on shots of Butler and his interpreter finally safe, and the sentimental scenes of their loved ones are interleaved with tears. The ending, which is a slack montage, really gave me chills. It’s cheap, but there’s a lot of good heart in it, and it’s hard to come by these days.
