I recently watched the action thriller Angel Has Fallen and was really impressed with Gerard Butler’s performance. Not his acting or stunt work – just the fact that he was somehow permitted to give this performance at all – meaning, he is starring in a movie as an action hero and plays a guy with a bad back.
Angel Has Fallen is an incredibly pedestrian action movie in which Gerard Butler plays Secret Service agent Mike Banning. According to the film’s official summary:
Banning hides the fact that he suffers from migraines and insomnia and takes painkillers to cope with chronic back pain.
Riveting. Banning is tasked with protecting the President, played by Morgan Freeman. The bad guys try to kill the President and he slips into a coma. Banning is then accused of being the one who tried to kill the president, and he has to fight his way out of it, all while having a bad back. Eventually a bunch of shit blows up and he clears his name.
The plot as you’d imagine leads to Gerard Butler engaging in a lot of hand to hand combat as well as tuck-and-rolls over cars while holding an assault rifle and things of that nature. These are pretty much your typical action scenes, accept that any time Butler clocks a guy or dives to take cover in a vestibule, there is a cut to him wincing and grabbing his lower back.
Ostensibly this is supposed to add a layer of tension to each scene, the stakes raised with each movement, as Butler has this added burden, so that when he does something relatively normal such as crouch down it’s supposed to represent some minor triumph, like when an old person makes it to their mailbox.
Unfortunately this manifests itself as Butler maneuvering in an incredibly ungraceful herky jerky fashion while behaving quite stoically, as if you’re watching a prideful dad with back problems try and launch a boat with a vein popping out of his forehead.
Basically he’s just doing things that a guy with a healthy back could do quite easily, making it really unimpressive to watch from an action standpoint.
I can see a few explanations as to how this bizarre decision was made:
- The creators of the film figured that this was a solid dramatic choice.
- The creators of the film noticed that Gerard Butler wasn’t incredibly graceful or athletic, so they bestowed this handicap on him to level the playing field.
- Gerard Butler came up with this idea himself, either because he actually has a bad back or because he realized his limitations, and, after filming, went around telling his friends that “It would have been better if they didn’t write in that thing about the back problems so that I could have jumped over a semi-truck.”
For the sake of discussion I’m going to assume that scenarios 2 and 3 are most applicable, which may nominate Butler for what I like to call the Scott Hall Award, which goes to someone who conveniently makes the most of their circumstances to the detriment of whatever project they’re involved in.
For those who don’t remember, Scott Hall was a professional wrestler who played, among others, a character named Razor Ramone. Like many wrestlers, Hall had a serious drug and alcohol problem, but his was so bad that he continuously appeared on TV completely fucked up and it made viewers and his peers very uncomfortable.
Instead of getting Hall some treatment, the WWE simply wrote his substance abuse problem into the show, and encouraged him to give belligerent monologues and show up to the ring with a cocktail in his hand.
While clearly an ethical breach, it actually made for compelling television.
There are other examples of this phenomenon. Adam Sandler setting all of his movies in Hawaii because he enjoys spending time in Hawaii. Jaret Leto winning awards for playing a transsexual in Dallas Buyers Club when he actually is a transsexual.
You have to make the most of your circumstances. If you don’t move around well, play a guy with a bad back. If you are a lazy fat ass, say you gained the weight for the role, it’s worth a shot.
I will say, in the case of Angel Has Fallen that if you watch the movie without thinking about these things, it’s about as average as its 39 percent on Rotten Tomatoes would suggest, but if you watch it, as I do, under the impression that Gerard Butler concocted the bad back angle to make everyday physical activities appear contextually miraculous, then it is more of a 68 percent.