Old Man Action Heroes Just Won’t Quit
ONE THING I’VE learned about myself as I approach middle age is that I like to watch actors older than me pretending to beat people up.
Which makes this a great time to (still) be alive, because that’s exactly what many of the best American action films of the past few years have been about: a man of a certain age who, when pushed to the limit, reveals the capacity to brutally mow down sneering younger antagonists who’ve underestimated him.
Give me a seemingly mild-mannered older protagonist who can answer a question like “What are you gonna do about it, Grandpa?” by grimly demonstrating everything he learned in Special Forces or the employ of the Belarusian mafia, and I’ll give you at least four stars on Letterboxd.
Liam Neeson’s career-transforming 2008 revenge picture, Taken, and its two sequels are the modern template for this sub-genre, along with 2011’s The Grey, a perfect movie about the star of Schindler’s List strapping broken bottles to his knuckles to fight a pack of wolves.
But since then, everybody’s gotten into the act, from elder action icons like Jackie Chan and Jean-Claude Van Damme to Jeff Bridges (on TV’s The Old Man) and Bob Odenkirk (in 2021’s Nobody). Even Denzel Washington has starred in a couple, and will do it again, at 68, in this fall’s The Equalizer 3.
If 2023’s slate of summer sequels is any indication, the era of the main-stream, mega budget Dad Kicks Ass movie is upon us.
Jason Momoa, 43, and Vin Diesel, 55, both star in Fast X. Keanu Reeves is making his fourth appearance as John Wick at 58. When the supposedly penultimate Mission: Impossible movie opens in July, Tom Cruise will be 61. And of course, there’s also Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, in which Harrison Ford will crack the whip one more time at the tender age of 80. Meanwhile, on Instagram, you can watch Hugh Jackman, 54, getting mutant swole to play Wolverine again in Deadpool III—and trash-talking his younger costar Ryan Reynolds, who’s 46.
Why This Doesn't Get Old
ALL ACTION MOVIES let us imagine doing something we’ll never do in real life, like crashing a $3.5 million car into a helicopter or spitting out a perfectly script-doctored one-liner after kicking a guy off a building.
But for anyone who grew up and then grew old watching Cruise and Reeves, the elder-action-hero subgenre speaks to more specific fantasies—to the idea that our bodies haven’t outlived their usefulness, either; that if pressed hard enough, we too could find the steel in ourselves to gun-fu a small army of hired assassins; that our lower-back pain does not define us.
Needless to say, you didn’t use to see 50-somethings kicking ass—and if you did, they weren’t enjoying it.
Roger Moore turned 57 while filming as James Bond for his seventh and final time—with the help of many fairly obvious stunt doubles—in 1985’s A View to a Kill. Notwithstanding a banger theme song by Duran Duran and a fierce villain performance by Grace Jones, it’s generally considered one of the worst Bonds—including by Moore himself—and most people believe Moore should have hung up the Walther after 1983’s Octopussy.
Minus Clint Eastwood, who was 55, and the eternally youthless Charles Bronson, who turned 64 that year, the big action stars of 1985 were all significantly younger than Moore—Chuck Norris was 45, Harrison Ford was 43, Michael Douglas was 41, Sylvester Stallone was 39, Arnold Schwarzenegger was 38, Mel Gibson was 29, and Eddie Murphy was only 24.
But the real problem with A View to a Kill isn’t the fact that Moore is 57. It’s that he looks like he feels 57. He looks tired. And whenever he shares the screen with Bond girl Tanya Roberts, then 36, she looks like she’s hanging out with her uncle. Moore himself admitted it seemed creepy and said he knew it was time to quit the gig.
But something weird has happened in the decades since Moore stepped down as 007. The average age of male leads in Hollywood movies has crept up, year over year—and ironically, this is particularly true of male leads in action movies.
For starters, 50 is no longer the hard line between youth and age that it once was, and neither is 60. This is especially the case with actors, who have access to the most advanced training and nutrition—and often the best and subtlest cosmetic surgery tons of money can buy, not to mention the rejuvenating powers of CGI—and can keep on taking physically demanding roles as long as their articular cartilage holds up.
What Retirement Age?
PART OF THE reason Cruise, Reeves, and their peers haven’t quit yet is that they don’t have to. And part of it is that there’s no longer a clear path forward for these guys that doesn’t involve wide-screen mayhem. But men aren’t fully immune to Hollywood ageism.
“Sean Connery could go on and have a career for 40 more years as a dramatic star without having to do his own stunts at age 60,” says veteran Hollywood columnist Richard Rushfield, editorial director of The Ankler. “There was a respectable adulthood that people aspired to, eventually. I think at this point if you’re not a perpetually young swashbuckling leading man, you might as well be dead. Nobody wants to play the dad or, God forbid, the grandfather.”
But the main reason these actors haven’t hung it up may be that the business won’t let them. Ford, Cruise, and Reeves (and even Diesel, who broke out in the early 2000s) might be spry for their respective ages, but they’re relics of a moment when everyone consumed the same media and moviegoers mostly agreed on who was famous—and therefore on who was big enough to headline an expensive new action franchise.
“We stopped minting new stars, basically, around the invention of the iPhone,” Rushfield points out. A Michael B. Jordan or a Simu Liu might have the chops and charisma to be the next Jackman or Neeson in theory, but Hollywood’s no longer building the kind of vehicles that could get them to that level.
A superhero movie might make you famous, but it won’t make you as famous as Cruise or Reeves, whose fame transcends individual projects and pretty much always has. Starring in a Marvel movie is less like making Top Gun and more like being one of many leads on a very popular TV show.
So the studios are left with two options: either focus on superhero IP, in which the real star of the movie is Spider-Man, or keep going back to the tried and true.
As long as this continues to be the case, anyone building a big-budget action film around a graying star could learn a thing or two from the Dad Kicks Ass canon—films that turn their actors’ age into a dramatic asset instead of ignoring it.
Dial of Destiny director James Mangold promised as much to The Hollywood Reporter in February. “The mistake you can make in movies,” Mangold said, “is when someone is of
a ripe age but the entire movie is continuing this charade along with them that they’re not that old.”
As with most things, we can look to Reeves for guidance on how to handle this gracefully. He was about to turn 50 when he took the role of John Wick, a part originally written for a much older actor. Now he’s pushing 60 and still doing it—and it’s totally fine, because the Wick films are still great, but also because with each passing year, they become a sharper meditation on the curious dilemma of the aging action star.
They’re the story of a man who’s very good at one thing—and the powerful forces that won’t let him stop doing it.
A version of this article originally appeared in the May/June 2023 issue of Men's Health.
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