The Constitution of the United Abdominal Muscles of Gerard Butler’s Filmography.
When I naively boasted to Collider’s senior editorial staff that I could absolutely rank the shit out of Gerard Butler’s movies, I made one very important miscalculation – Gerard Butler has made no less than 78,000 films in the past two decades. And while nothing would more enrich my soul than hunkering down to watch several hundred hours of the Swole Scotsman, it’s simply not possible for me to do that and also meet my deadline. So, what I’ve done is ranked all of Gerard Butler’s biggest movies, with the intention of adding more of his films to the list every so often. Think of this as a living document, the Constitution of the United Abdominal Muscles of Gerard Butler’s Filmography.
Once you accept the sentence “Gerard Butler is a scientist,” all bets are off. Butler stars as a man who designed a network of satellites that can literally control the weather, but the satellites get hijacked by a madman who wants to take over the world. This film is pure Roland Emmerich 90s disaster trash (it was co-written and directed by Emmerich’s longtime producing partner Dean Devlin), complete with an ensemble cast that includes Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Richard Schiff, Andy Garcia, Zazie Beetz, Abbie Cornish, Robert Sheehan, and Eugenio Derbez, several of whom will be dead by the end credits. Butler is thunderously unbelievable as a scientist, and the movie feels incredibly dated even though it was released in 2017. That said, it isn’t hurting anybody, and if you love dopey Emmerich films, you could do worse than Geostorm. And honestly, when else are you going to see Gerard Butler go to space to repair a rogue satellite?
American audiences got their first real taste of Gerard Butler when he played Dracula in the imaginatively titled 2000 horror film Dracula 2000. Let me be the first to tell you that this movie is both A) dumb as shit, and B) extremely fun to watch. Butler’s performance is little more than smoldering, open-mouthed looks (he doesn’t speak his first line until over 30 minutes into the film), but the script manages to craft an interesting backstory for the famous vampire that pays off with an unexpectedly emotional climax. The best parts of Dracula 2000 are when it updates Brahm Stoker’s story for the modern world – the scene aboard the Demeter now takes place in an airplane, and they pull some genuinely clever tricks with the idea that Dracula’s image doesn’t appear in mirrors or on videotape. However, it is intensely stupid and loaded with generally terrible acting, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing depending on what kind of mood you’re in. And Butler is supremely watchable, even though he has about as many lines as Boba Fett.
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