The gloriously named ‘Plane’ is yet another action movie that showcases the actor’s talents, and proof that they just don’t make ’em like this anymore.
Charged with locating—and hopefully rescuing—the crew and passengers of a mysteriously downed commercial airliner in Plane, the former Special Forces operative in control (Tony Goldwyn) asks for some information about the flight’s pilot. His answer comes in the form of a blurry cellphone video of one Captain Brodie Torrance—a hulking brute played by a stubbly Gerard Butler—subduing a drunken, verbally abusive passenger by putting him in a WWE-style choke hold. The smackdown supposedly went viral, which explains why Captain Brodie got demoted to flying across the entire Pacific in bad weather on New Year’s Eve. The airline’s publicist is horrified, but Goldwyn’s military man smiles. “I like this guy.”
It’s a ’90s action movie line, and Butler and his new star vehicle are likable in a ’90s action movie way. Poking holes in the narrative and dramatic contrivance of a movie simply titled Plane is easy enough, beginning with the unlikelihood that an employee could KO a passenger and keep his license and extending to the fact that our hero is later able to hold his own against waves of heavily armed Filipino militiamen trying to turn him and the other crash survivors into hostages. Cowritten by British spy novelist Charles Cumming and directed by French genre specialist Jean-François Richet—best known for remaking John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13—Plane is the kind of movie that doesn’t sweat its own credibility (or political correctness) and that leans into predictability at every turn. For instance, you get no points for guessing that Brodie’s most menacing passenger—the bald-domed, dead-eyed convict (Michael Colter) being chaperoned between prisons—is not such a bad guy after all, or that the pair are destined to team up and take out the bad guys commando-style.
Nor should you be surprised that Brodie is a widower trying to survive the ordeal for the sake of his precocious, devoted teenage daughter, who just wants her daddy to come home.Here’s the thing about clichés: A lot of the time, they work. And at 53, Butler has made a pretty nice career out of bending them to his will. In 2019, Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri wrote that the Scottish-born actor—a former law student who broke into the London theater scene in the mid-’90s through sheer force of will before his break in Dracula 2000—was “almost single-handedly keeping a very specific type of movie alive.” While the vast majority of action stars yearn to cross over to other genres, Butler stoically stays in his lane. He’s made the odd romantic comedy, dabbled in period pieces and Shakespeare, and even taken a turn as a brooding show-tune jukebox in Joel Schumacher’s unfortunate big-screen adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera—an early role that nearly torpedoed his momentum before it even got going.
But other than those outliers, Butler has been content to cultivate a very particular sweet spot: a rumpled, two-fisted charisma that evokes a whole host of other above-the-title names (Ebiri mentioned Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, and Liam Neeson as analogues) while retaining a sort of journeyman’s modesty. If he’s prone to going over the top, it’s usually due less to show-offy technique than to a tendency to be cast as guys with short fuses. It’s just fun to watch him go off.Case in point: 300, which isn’t exactly an actor’s showcase but takes its cues from Butler’s bellowy, abs-first interpretation of King Leonidas. In a 2019 video interview with GQ, Butler revealed that his all-caps line reading of “THIS IS SPARTA” was an in-the-moment instinct and that his costars’ immediate reaction was to laugh it off—an anecdote that says something interesting about Butler’s instincts and director Zack Snyder’s as well.
The only reason 300 works is because Butler refuses to split hairs between looking intimidating and looking ridiculous; in a movie that fuses fleshy physicality and anodyne CGI at a molecular level, he stylizes himself into a special effect. The same goes for 2009’s Gamer, a startlingly unpleasant and underrated sci-fi satire by the filmmaking duo of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who followed up giving Jason Statham the role of a lifetime in Crank by harnessing Butler’s roughneck credentials for a VR-themed variation on The Running Man. Playing a death-row inmate who staves off his execution by acting as a “slayer”—a living, breathing human avatar for wealthy online video gamers—Butler showcases the requisite intensity to not only survive Neveldine and Taylor’s frenetic editing style, but to ground it as well.
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