Our movie action heroes are old. Not old for being people, but old for running around kicking bad-guy ass. Keanu Reeves is 59. Tom Cruise is 61. Liam Neeson is 71. German film executive Fred Kogel, distributor of the Expendables and John Wick movies in that country, is worried. Via Variety:
He noted that many of today’s action stars are the same ones he watched on the big screen back in the 1980s, among them Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise.
Action movie fans identified with these actors because they could believe they were doing their own stunts, he added. There was “a great deal of identification with the type of the actor, with the physicality of the actor, so you could relate to that.”
By contrast, in modern CGI-laden superhero movies, “the younger generation doesn’t even know who does what.”
“I think it’s on [the industry] to build up new stars again, with the physicality, with the looks and with the sympathetic, great-acting factor – you need that. It’s in our own hands.[”]
Which got me thinking: Is there anyone in the pipeline who might make a transition to action flicks? I honestly cannot think of anyone who could carry on the tradition of the 80s stars. The babies of the current crop of whom we might consider up-and-coming action stars are not that young: John David Washington (Tenet, The Creator) is 39, Chris Pine (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Star Trek) is 43, Chris Pratt (Jurassic World, Guardians of the Galaxy) is 44. (For comparison’s sake, Bruce Willis was just 33 when Die Hard was released in 1988… and he was considered an unlikely action hero because he’d previously been known for the romantic mystery dramedy TV series Moonlighting. Pratt is a close analogy, maybe, with his sitcom background, but he does not share Willis’s ineffable screen charisma.)
On the other hand, perhaps we’re done with action movies for a while? Cuz Expend4bles — starring Sylvester Stallone (77), Dolph Lundgren (65), and Jason Statham (56) — is tanking. Maybe the appeal of this sort of movie has passed and the subgenre should take a break for a decade or two?
In which case, this could be a completely superfluous question. But anyway: What young actor (of any gender) working today could be the next great action star?
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