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There are few modern action stars as perfectly suited to disaster movies as Gerard Butler. He’s spent much of his career occupying that sweet spot between movie-star charisma and barely contained panic: the guy who can throw a punch, bark an order, save a president, and look genuinely horrified when everything around him starts exploding. Zack Snyder’s 300 made him an icon, Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen turned him into one of the great modern American action heroes, and Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland proved he could sell the terror of an ordinary person caught in an extraordinary catastrophe. Even when Butler is dealing with material that’s completely ridiculous, he has a way of making it feel like the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher.
Case in point: Geostorrm. Dean Devlin’s 2017 directorial debut takes the disaster genre’s fondness for escalation and (quite literally) launches it into orbit. When the movie begins, several devastating environmental disasters leads humanity to develop a network of satellites capable of controlling the weather. Following a three-year time jump, the same system meant to keep Mother Nature at bay is malfunctioning and turning the planet’s own climate against itself. It’s ridiculous, but the kind of ridiculous that lets you shut your brain off and enjoy the ride.
Who better to drag you into that mess than Butler’s Jake Lawson? While he might not look it, Lawson’s the same engineer who led the creation of the orbital weather system, called “Dutch Boy.” He’s also the only man stubborn enough (and potentially smart enough) to figure out what’s gone wrong with the machine. It’s the kind of role that feels as if it were designed in a laboratory to maximize Butler’s particular talents.
Despite a stacked ensemble cast that includes Ed Harris and Zazie Beetz, Butler dominates as Jake. The character boils down to a concentrated dose of the actor’s most reliable screen persona. He’s brilliant yet stubborn, occasionally reckless, and absolutely convinced that he is the only person in the room who understands how bad things truly are. Butler doesn’t need much dialogue to communicate any of this, either. Give him a malfunctioning satellite, a rapidly deteriorating situation, and about five seconds to figure out what everyone else has missed, and he knows exactly how to play it. There is a physicality to his performances that makes even the dumbest blockbuster premise feel briefly tangible. You believe that this guy might actually be able to fix everything because Butler sells that belief perfectly from Jake’s point of view.
The opening courtroom scene conveys this almost immediately. Jake is there to defend his work, but instead of calmly making his case, he needles the politicians questioning him and carries himself like the entire hearing is merely an inconvenience standing between him and being proven right. He’s a jerk almost from the moment he opens his mouth, but Butler has just enough conviction to make you want to hear him out. You can root for the character while simultaneously understanding why everyone else in the room wants him to sit down and stop talking.
Devlin, meanwhile, understands that Geostorm works best when the film stops pretending it’s anything other than popcorn entertainment. His background as a producer and writer on movies like Independence Day is all over the film’s DNA with its multiple storylines, global stakes, earnest speeches, and the increasingly elaborate destruction. It isn’t subtle, and it certainly isn’t interested in being restrained. A weather-control satellite malfunctions, inevitably becoming the catalyst for some admittedly stellar imagery. Hurricanes, flash freezes, fireballs, collapsing buildings and electrical storms give way to some serious set dressing, all working to hide the real story of a plot to assassinate the entire U.S. cabinet and its commander-in-chief.
Those stakes are exactly why Butler is so important to the story. Geostorm has plenty of incredible performances, and more than enough spectacle. It’s also one of the most ridiculous disaster film ideas since Roland Emmerich’s 2012. But Butler gives all of that nonsense a recognizable human center. He has made an entire career out of being the guy you want around when everything goes catastrophically wrong. Geostorm gives him the biggest possible version to excel at that job. Somehow, he feels like he’s exactly where he belongs.
Geostorm is streaming on Tubi
