![]() ![]() Unfortunately, Butler is the weakest link here. Den of Thieves suddenly transforms into a surprisingly tense crime flick, as we watch the thieves’ genuinely impressive plan unfold with the cops struggling to keep up. The movie is a bit of a slog in parts, and I couldn’t give less of a fig about the B plot concerning Butler’s dissolving marriage, but once we get to the heist in the second half, the whole thing takes off like the Rocketeer. Butler plays a perpetually drunk scumbag detective hot on the trail of a team of criminal masterminds, attempting to crack their master plan of robbing the Federal Reserve in Los Angeles. Greenland is a better-than-average disaster drama that suffered from its release date - I can think of very few people who would enjoy sitting through such a dark, humorless film about societal collapse in the year of our lord 2020.ĭen of Thievesis a little too long and a little too devoted to Gerard Butler as its star, but if you stick with it, it turns into a rewarding heist film with a shootout climax that echoes Michael Mann’s Heatin terms of stakes and intensity. It’s an incredibly serious, sobering look at the end of the world, with very little hope to be found. I came into this movie expecting a level of Roland Emmerich disaster flick seriousness (like in Butler’s other apocalyptic film Geostorm), but that is very much not what this movie is. Greenlandis an incredibly bleak film about the breakup of society and the horrible things people will do to each other in the name of survival. The movie follows them struggling to reunite and get to some kind of safety as the world literally comes to an end around them. However, Garrity’s diabetic son is denied access, and he and his wife Allison ( Morena Baccarin) are separated in the confusion. ![]() Plus, he has an improbable but tense knife fight with Dylan McDermott, and that’s something.ĭirector Ric Roman Waugh’s brutal apocalypse movie stars Butler as John Garrity, a structural engineer whose family is selected to report to a top-secret bunker after a world-ending comet begins to break up and pummel the Earth’s surface. Butler is totally believable as an emotionally wounded but determined hero who will still rise to the occasion and stab as many people in the brain as necessary to rescue the president. Despite those moments, it’s a reasonably solid action movie, albeit a bit grim (the film begins by dropping Ashley Judd off of a bridge). There’s a few embarrassing moments of melodramatic patriotism, such as when President Aaron Eckhart loudly declares “We don’t negotiate with terrorists!” right before the terrorists shoot a woman to death in front of him, and Melissa Leo defiantly growls out the Pledge of Allegiance while the bad guys drag her away. Gerard Butler plays a Secret Service agent Die Harding his way through the White House after it is taken over by North Korean terrorists, and he does his fair share of hateful killing before the end credits roll. Both movies were released the same year, but Olympus Has Fallen eschews all the shlocky fun of Emmerich’s movie in favor of an overserious action thriller. Olympus Has Fallen is like the angry stepbrother of Roland Emmerich’s White House Down. And Butler is supremely watchable, even though he has about as many lines as Boba Fett. ![]() 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. 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. 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. Let me be the first to tell you that this movie is both A) dumb as shit, and B) extremely fun to watch. American audiences got their first real taste of Gerard Butler when he played Dracula in the imaginatively titled 2000 horror film Dracula 2000. ![]()
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