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SCOTTISH EXPAT, FAILED lawyer, King of the Huns, lord of the vampires, brother of Billy Connolly–Gerard Butler had lived many lives on and off screen before his Hollywood breakthrough in the mid-2000s. Since his explosive entrance to the dudebro canon as the Spartan king in Zack Snyder’s 300, Butler has brought as much grit and conviction as possible to a career of mid-budget, brainless thrills. His action heroes can throw (and field) a punch, his romantic foils are charismatic and bawdy, and when his characters are pushed to the brink, they rarely show mercy.
Butler’s action films may have missed out on critical praise for years, but his passion and still-intact star power helps to fill a gap in a saturated entertainment market–modestly budgeted genre pics that push for theatrical rollout that also perform well at home. Even though Butler’s streak of late-noughties blockbusters is behind him, he excels at a robust, B-tier crowd pleaser that can smuggle true action craft into archetypal premises. You’ve heard these movie plots before–a Secret Service army of one defending America under siege; a violent, righteous man stuck behind bars when he shouldn’t be; a dirty cop on his last legs obsessed with catching a master thief–but once you dive into his filmography, you realize that many Gerard Butler films are the platonic ideal of their premises.
That last premise has struck gold for Butler twice now: Den of Thieves was a long-gestating passion project of writer-director Christian Gudegast that became a mini-hit in its January 2018 release window, and the dirtbag heist saga travels to the South of France in the equally electric sequel, Pantera. We won’t go as far to call for a Gerry-naissance, but if you do see any calls for it, feel free to tell people it was our idea. To honor a new Gerard Butler movie that makes dudes (gender neutral) everywhere say “hell yeah”, we ranked 15 action films that deserve reappraisal, if not a Criterion Collection release, from our Celtic king.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life (2003)
Betcha didn’t know Gerard Butler was the dashing romantic foil to Lara Croft. He’s also one of the reasons Cradle of Life is anywhere near watchable, matching Angelina Jolie’s smarmy, sultry, and British-accented heroine with a flirty laddishness that guides us through increasingly nonsensical plotting. Butler plays Terry Sheridan, an ex-Royal Marine who turned against the Crown and is locked up in a Kazakhstan prison for his traitorous mercenary exploits when Lara needs his help hunting Pandora’s Box. Jolie is so in control in her Tomb Raider films that Butler feels like a welcome jolt of chaos, radiating macho bravado to counter her put-togetherness. Butler plays an obnoxious romantic lead a few times in his career, but this is the closest he gets to a swashbuckler.
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Hunter Killer (2018)
A bit of an outlier on this list—Butler is fairly leveled and, in terms of story responsibilities, secondary in this strangely busy military thriller. On the surface, Hunter Killer revitalizes the Hollywood’s love affair with submarines (Crimson Tide, The Hunt for Red October, K-19: The Widowmaker), casting Butler as a stern, dedicated captain who collaborates with his Russian enemy to save American lives, but the film spends a lot of time with NAVY Seals on an unorthodox mission in enemy territory, inviting comparisons to turgid military films like Lone Survivor and Act of Valor. Hunter Killer’s greatest sin—apart from wasting top tier talent like Gary Oldman and Linda Cardellini in cutaways to decision rooms—is that it’s solely interested in being a normal movie, and while its ’90s-era conventionality makes for a comfortable watch, “Gerard Butler in a submarine” ought to inspire more crazy antics.
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Copshop (2021)
This is the first of three films on this list that prove that it’s a bad idea to put Gerard Butler behind bars. Ostensibly a throwback to ’70s exploitation films, blending Western archetypes with garish, filth-caked violence, Copshop feels more like the wannabe grindhouse crime films that spouted in the wake of Tarantino’s early success. But if Copshop is anything to go by, Gerard Butler would be amazing in less-than-classics like Go, The Big Hit, The Boondock Saints–playing a scuzzy, violent professional criminal suits his post-mainstream acting chops. He plays Viddick, a ruthless killer who gets arrested just so he’s in the adjoining cell to his target (Frank Grillo), and is indirectly responsible for most of the film’s copious bloodshed.
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London Has Fallen (2016)
What started as the grisly twin of the bouncy, buddy-comedy White House Down became a veritable franchise—a trilogy of “Gerard Butler in the Secret Service” films and a French spin-off Paris Has Fallen, released in 2024. There’s no getting around the boorish, xenophobic patriotism of this series, but despite featuring many of the trilogy’s blindspots, London is the best entry. Directed by Iranian filmmaker Babak Najafi, the film pits Presidential bodyguard Mike Banning against a fleet of Islamic terrorists who almost wipe out the G7 leaders in Britain’s capital as revenge for US Air Force drone strikes in Pakistan. There’s a confused, contradictory political edge to the villainous plot, even though America’s jingoistic victim complex ultimately wins the day. Under Najafi’s guidance, London is still an effective, bloody thriller on the city’s streets—with Action Hero Butler at his most demented.
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Plane (2023)
Gerard Butler films are no stranger to the B-tier January release slot—it’s a safe space for unambitious, mid-budget genre pics in a quiet, awards-focused month. Before Pantera, the last Butler film to drop in January was Plane, an impressively simple action film that pairs an airline pilot (Butler) with an extradited passenger (Mike Colter) as they fight for their lives after they crash land on an island controlled by guerilla soldiers. The film is a great example of why we come back to Gerry: within the confines of a sub-2 hour thriller, he plays Men on a Mission to maximum effect, and his bug-eyed exasperation translates to fistfights, shootouts, and aeronautical getaways. Audiences turned up for Plane because it was Gerard Butler and a plane, a deliberately simple set-up that made no qualms about being brainless fun.
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Shattered (2007)
By far the most obscure film on this list, this cat-and-mouse thriller doesn’t reach white knuckle heights, but wrings a good deal of excitement from its ludicrous story thanks to a trio of heavy-hitter leads. Gerard Butler is a cocky, hot-tempered businessman married to a loving wife (Maria Bello), but when their daughter is held hostage by a psychopath (Pierce Brosnan), everything cozy and respectable about their domestic bliss threatens to fall apart. Butler is on the backfoot for the 90-minute runtime, reeling and spluttering through the hoops and punishments set up by Brosnan. It never escapes that “post-90s spec script” feeling that plagued a lot of high-concept 2000s thrillers
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300 (2007)
Apologies for not putting Butler’s defining role higher up the list, but Zack Snyder’s fascistic, revisionist retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae doesn’t exactly need a popularity boost. As King Leonidas, Butler’s bearded, sculpture-like form is so in tune with Snyder’s epic-courting visual style that the actor often feels like a stop-motion figurine being moved and repositioned exactly as the filmmaker intends. As a technical exercise, 300 is as commanding as Butler’s awe-inspiring Spartan leader (and boy, can he bellow a war chant) and its seismic impact on modern action cinema is plain to see. But the film’s eagerness to embrace ethnostate values complicates all the shots of beautiful bodies, turning its enthusiasm for male desire and beauty into a big regressive mess. We deserve films that better understand Gerard Butler’s capacity for homoeroticism.
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RocknRolla (2008)
Before he got back on track with blockbuster romps, Guy Ritchie was in freefall. His disastrous rom-com Swept Away cast a shadow over his return to gritty, masculine crime films, even though RocknRolla was more of a deliberate successor to his early capers than the strangely philosophical Revolver. Nevertheless, a gangster film interested in London’s changing economic landscape puts RocknRolla in conversation with The Long Good Friday, and the splintered narrative really hammers home the cluelessness of our upstart street thugs–including a brattish, brawling Butler as “OneTwo”. In 2025, there’s no chance you could call the gay panic subplot between Butler and Tom Hardy “harmless,” but outside of Ritchie’s most groan-worthy indulgences, this is a showy and commendable display of Butler’s most charming and cheeky comic instincts at the peak of his Hollywood powers.
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Law Abiding Citizen (2009)
Twice in one year, Butler played a righteous avenger locked up behind bars–trust us when we say the Neveldine and Taylor film is the smarter one. When narcissistic prosecuting attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) pushes for an unjust plea bargain in a double homicide, widower Clyde Shelton (Butler) plots revenge for a decade on anyone who supported or benefited from the miscarriage of justice. The noble ambitions of a 2000s thriller convinced that America’s legal history is built on intentional blindspots that protect the system more than victims are clear (the bank bailout of 2008 was signed into law exactly one year before the film’s release), but Law Abiding Citizen wins or loses you depending on your appetite for completely far-fetched action plotting. Does it matter that Clyde Shelton has impossible foresight and resources at his disposable? Yes if you want a socially-conscious thriller, no if you want to see Gerard tap into a truly righteous anger that causes the world around him to collapse.
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Gods of Egypt (2016)
No one makes Hollywood pictures like Alex Proyas, for better or worse. His most recent film, Gods of Egypt, received plenty of deserved criticism for its majority white cast (including thoughtful insight from cast member Chadwick Boseman) and is best remembered as being a staggering bomb. But Gerard Butler blockbusters are few and far between, and his performance as the power-hungry god Set is packed with hammy, charismatic charm and makes this the best big-budget production he’s been involved in. The elastic, expansive CG backdrops are a perfect backdrop for a god who feels more petty and bitter than terrifying–if you’re going to chew scenery, then the scenery should be as colorful and cartoonish as this. Towering above his mortal co-stars, a dab hand with antiquated weapons, and prone to transforming into a bipedal dog-like beast, there’s something about Butler’s swaggering, over-the-top presence that just feels right for the rejected, galaxy-brained fantasy film.
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Coriolanus (2011)
A rare prestige project for Butler that still feels in keeping with his scheming, righteous antiheroes—as well as a reminder for Shakespeare’s peerless ability to tap into primal dramatic emotions. Ralph Fiennes’s directorial debut is a suitably actor-brained modern reinterpretation of the Bard’s Coriolanus, filled with provocative images of present-day conflict and crumbling regimes but relegating them to window-dressing in favor of the European tradition of “Imagining Your Country is Just Like Ancient Rome.” Coriolanus is a minor tragedy from the Bard, but the didactic story of an exiled general who joins forces with his enemies to lead a coup on Rome is the perfect fit for Butler (one of his first acting gigs was in a London production of the play). He plays the rival general Tullus Aufidius with a ferocity and shrewdness that emphasizes his sharp dramatic instincts—after all, the depth of clear feeling that Shakespeare offers had been an actor’s gift for centuries.
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Greenland (2020)
One of the rare Gerard Butler thrillers where he is not a cop, a criminal, or a captain—John Garrity is a structural engineer and a Regular Guy when he discovers he, his wife, and their son have been selected for emergency shelter—which puts a damper on their plans to jovially watch the comet on TV with their neighbors. From its opening minutes, Greenland plunges John (and the audience) into an urgent unease, pushing Butler’s desperate character up against the rules and discipline of the military rather than wielding their power himself. As an action film, Greenland is interested purely in survival, and Butler’s restless, loyal dedication to his divided family invites a pathos and sensitivity that is rarely seen elsewhere in his filmography. This is the Gerard Butler film that might make you cry, and it doesn’t deny you gripping tension in order to get there.
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Gamer (2009)
This film may be occasionally tasteless, headache-inducing, and politically incoherent, but these are the concessions us Butlerians must make in service of a true cinematic vision. The same year as Crank 2: High Voltage, madcap digital gurus Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor gave us a look into a crass and ugly future, where cash-strapped citizens can give up their bodily autonomy to voyeuristic gamers and death row inmates are controlled via microchip by teenage first-person shooter players. There’s plenty of wild things to gawk over—baby Logan Lerman using discriminatory language from the word go, Michael C. Hall doing the most outlandish tech bro accent, Ludacris being a Morpheus-like rebel leader, but as a vengeful spirit trying to wrestle back control, Butler rises to the challenge of his directors’s frenetic, disorientating visual style by playing someone so brutal and stony-faced, it feels like a parody of the decades of B-movie action heroes.
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Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
Yes, Pantera really is all that–Butler and Gudegast have struck gold twice with the saga of Big Nick. After two hours of flopping hard (we’ll get to that in the first film), flailing dirty cop Big Nick embarks on a solitary mission to catch a thief, taking him and Donnie to Nice, France where a diamond heist is in the works. Like the first installment, Gudegast unfolds the heist over the entire second half of the film, omitting key details until they have the greatest dramatic impact. Big Nick is in his penitence era, reflecting on his failures and willing to do morally compromising work (but not the type that indulges his destructive urges, a shocking twist from the first film) to get close to closure. As a self-loathing braggart confounded by meticulous heists, Butler gives one of his best observed and acutely emotional performances in his career.
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Den of Thieves (2018)
Who is Big Nick O’Brien? On a plot level, he’s an L.A. County Sheriff committed to bringing down a crew of bank robbers. But on a psychological level, he is a man fueled by his moral and physical vices, slowly learning that he was put on God’s earth to take straight L’s at home and in the line of duty. Butler put on nearly 30 pounds to play the corrupt cop, and used every inch of extra mass to convey the heavy stress and strain that Nick encounters at every obstacle–despite how arrogant and confident he is in pursuit of his criminal targets. The last we see of Big Nick before Den of Thieves shifts into pulse-pounding heist mode, he breaks down in tears over his estrangement from his children–signaling how little composure and self-control our alleged cop hero possesses before his ass is handed to him by the robbers. This is the stuff that Gerard Butler dreams are made of.
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