Butler has been making nostalgic mid-budget action movies for so long he’s perfected his own formula.
Images and themes from “300” recur in Butler’s films. There is loyalty to the fatherland and its defenders, the passing of “respect and honor” from father to son, gentle homophobia towards “philosophers and boy lovers” by half-naked alpha males, stoicism, nurturing women, “no mercy” conflicts with foreigners, heroic sacrifices, David-and-Goliath battles. “I’m just a law-abiding citizen — I’m just a common man,” says Butler in “Law-Abiding Citizen,” which came out three years after “300.” In it, an engineer named Clyde Shelton sees his wife and daughter murdered in front of him, but the biggest wound comes from the justice system, through a prosecutor played by Jamie Foxx. Clyde responds with a bit of a killing spree, promising to bring the whole “sick corrupt temple” down on the lawyer’s head – “It’s going to be biblical.”
It’s the trilogy of ‘Olympus Has Fallen’, ‘London Has Fallen’ and ‘Angel Has Fallen’, with their combined box office of $522 million, that consolidated Butler’s brand as the kind of humble action star that has largely disappeared from theaters. In these films, Secret Service agent Mike Banning, who becomes more and more broken over time, protects the president from various throwaway terrorists. He runs on steaks, and later on painkillers, and always ends up battered, emerging into the light and supporting a commander-in-chief who says something like, “They came to desecrate our way of life. To tarnish our beliefs. Trample our freedom. And in this they not only failed, they gave us the greatest gift: a chance for our rebirth.
If this sounds like it’s sprung from a conservative imagination, well, the franchise’s multicultural goons and deep-state conspiracies will certainly be familiar to that audience. But while Butler is the kind of guy invited to the Pentagon to promote a thriller about Navy SEALs, his stance on these films is rougher and clearer. Facing criticism for “London Has Fallen”, he argued at the premiere that “it’s about us winning” and “it’s based on heroism and the good guys kicking each other.” This general machismo retains its appeal even as his films become more mainstream — dropping jingoism for “Angel Has Fallen” or, in 2017’s “Geostorm,” taking a cuckoo catastrophe movie ride. In 2018’s “Den of Thieves,” where the masculinity is just close enough to dilute the toxicity, he plays a leather-clad cop who drinks Pepto like whiskey and tries to take down some ex-Marines who want to rob the Federal Reserve . In “Greenland,” he’s another engineer in another disaster, trying to get his family into a bunker (and, in individualistic American fashion, refusing to help his neighbors). January’s “Airplane” was positively communist by comparison, with the slogan “survive together or die alone.” In it, he is a commercial pilot with an Air Force background whose plane crashes on a Separatist-held Philippine island. There remain the obvious conservative themes – untrustworthy superiors, renegade saviors, barbaric foreigners – but it’s the perfect Butler for all audiences, a propulsive popcorn movie with an righteous core.
Perhaps it is inevitable that the same man who continues to be repulsed on screen would do the same. Butler has not appeared on the cover of a mainstream magazine since 2018. He seems to have gone a little crazy when Inverse called him “the king of the B movie” to his face in a January interview. He knows he has a large audience, but I wonder if he knows how much goodwill he has accumulated. In “Kandahar,” he plays an undercover cop exposed by a leak “bigger than Snowden and WikiLeaks combined,” in a script brimming with “free world” jokes and aphorisms like “you have to return home to know 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’ “Low Tide” plays over shots of Butler and his translator, safe at last, interspersed with sentimental scenes of their loved ones. It’s cheap, but it has a good heart in it, and that’s hard to find these days.