Gerard Butler Keeps Making the Most Gerard Butler-iest of Movies. Thank God.
Gerard Butler isn’t just a meat-and-potatoes action star. He’s a cup of coffee, black and no sugar. He’s a rare T-bone—hold the sauce and the sides. Hell, he’s a cigarette and a shot of whisky (with a beer chaser) the morning after a long night of drinking. When it comes to rugged, thick-skinned, no-nonsense, back-to-basics ass-kicking, he’s your man of few words and many, many kills.
Butler is the king of modern Hollywood programmers, an A-lister who fits perfectly into frills-free genre pictures, and Kandahar (in theaters May 26) is another entry in his unabashedly gung-ho oeuvre. With a title that’s as simple—if not nearly as funny—as his prior Plane, Butler’s latest reteams him with his Angel Has Fallen and Greenland director Ric Roman Waugh for a saga that’s more than faintly reminiscent of Guy Ritchie’s recent Jake Gyllenhaal war film The Covenant. What he delivers is precisely what fans are likely looking for, albeit in a package that’s more politically muddled than is necessary.
Tom Harris (Gerard Butler) is an MI6 “lifer” who’s currently working on loan for the CIA, who have him undercover in Qom, Iran, as a telephone repairman so he can install a device in a junction box that’ll allow the agency to corrupt the country’s nuclear reactor systems. When Tom’s toil results in a covert facility going kaboom, he readies himself for a trip back home to an ex-wife who isn’t interested in reconciling and a teenage daughter (Olivia-Mai Barrett) who expects him to attend her graduation.