As the world’s premier only chronicler of the Gerard Butler Cinematic Universe, I have to admit that a lot of it is, well…quite shit.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I will go to the mat any day of the week for his brilliant blockbusters like Greenland or Geostorm, or his action thrillers like Den of Thieves, Copshop, or Law-Abiding Citizen, or his more serious dramatic work in stuff like The Vanishing. But all the great movies in the world can’t make up for the fact that his back catalogue is stuffed with stinkers – Gamer and Last Seen Alive are the kind of cinematic gash that even I can’t defend, and trust me, I’ve tried.
All this to say that Plane, his 2023 collaboration with director Jean-François Richet, falls firmly into the latter category, and I am particularly disappointed by that. Because I feel like Butler was made for the kind of cheesy, polished action blockbusters that used to populate the mainstream; if Air Force One were remade today, there’s nobody who could do it but him, you know? There’s a really gap in the blockbuster market, in my eyes, for standalone popcorn fun that isn’t tied in to some wheezing, sagging franchise that requires you to watch a half-dozen movies before you so much as see the title card, and that was exactly what Plane failed at being.
Plane follows Brodie Torrance (Butler), an ex-RAF pilot flying a commercial flight to Honolulu before a failure in the aircraft forces them to pitch up on a Philipino island that has come under the control of a mercenary group that he must protect his passengers from. Oh, and Mike Colter is there, I guess, though you would hardly know it given how badly they butcher the potential of this character – he’s a killer being transported back to the US to face trial, and, despite Colter’s easy charisma and great chemistry with Butler, his plotline is so hopelessly truncated it feels like at least two-thirds of it was dumped before the final edit.
And Colter is not the only victim of this dreadful script, which completely blows whatever trashy potential fun it might have held for a trudgingly boring and badly-paced storyline that sees Butler sweat his way through every shirt in a ten-mile radius while the remaining cast try to differentiate themselves from one another given the eight seconds of screentime they all seem to have. What the film lacks, beyond the awful character work and dialogue so blatantly expository it might as well be handing you annotated post-it notes every ten minutes, is a sense of forward momentum, that feeling of one problem after another rising and being dispatched by a meaningfully capable cast. Action thrillers like this thrive on a sense of frantic motion, and, even though this movie is named after a method of transport, it fails to deliver on virtually any of it.
The movie faced an (entirely justified) backlash for its depiction of the Philippines, too, and that’s just another in a long line of reasons that lands Plane firmly at the bottom end of Butler’s filmography. I think my next venture into the Butlerverse is going to have to be one of his prestige pieces, because damn, I don’t think I can take another stinker like this one. Recommendations welcome – where in the GBCU should we head next? Let me know in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Netflix)
No But Listen 