Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: Is Tom Cruise the last action hero?
ParamountTom Cruise, Harrison Ford and Sylvester Stallone are among today's leading action heroes – is Hollywood too dependent on the ageing stars of the 1980s, asks Nicholas Barber.
Judging by the success of the new Mission: Impossible film on its opening weekend, audiences still love Tom Cruise. Specifically, they love to see him fight, drive fast cars and leap from terrifying heights, which is lucky, because that's what he loves to do. Over the last decade, Cruise has concentrated almost exclusively on becoming an action megastar, applying his famously intense focus to devising and executing ever more elaborate stunts: in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, he speeds off a cliff on a motorbike, and parachutes down to the valley below.
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What is so impressive about these energetic and frankly dangerous feats is that Cruise is 61, which seems like a ripe old age for such undertakings. But in fact he is a mere stripling compared to Hollywood's other leading action heroes. The main selling point of The Flash was the return of Michael Keaton (71) as Batman, Sylvester Stallone (77) and Dolph Lundgren (65) will soon be in the fourth Expendables film, Arnold Schwarzenegger (75) has a hit action-comedy series, FUBAR, on Netflix, Liam Neeson (71) will be in Retribution, releasing in August, and Denzel Washington (68) will be in The Equalizer 3, which is out in September. And they're all spring chickens compared to Indiana Jones himself, Harrison Ford, who turned 81 last Thursday. Why is Hollywood so dependent on grey-haired actors being violent?
"There's something comforting about seeing these guys," says Nick de Semlyen, author of The Last Action Heroes, a chronicle of the action-movie boom of the 1980s. "There's a real nostalgic appeal to them, because they hark back to the 80s when things seemed a bit simpler. And they give you hope that when you hit that age, you might be as active as they are."
Not that this is a new phenomenon. It was 10 years ago that Matt Patches coined the term "geri-action movies" when the likes of Red, Taken, Escape Plan and The Expendables showed that stars in their 50s and above could still throw punches and fire machine guns. "Thanks to the wonders of endless TV repeats, the classics from the Stallone-Schwarzenegger-era are still weaning young audiences on action," wrote Patches in Vulture. "They're instantly recognisable to the entire world - a priority for studios looking to rake in the box office dollars overseas."
Brands before stars
Today, Hollywood is even more fixated on well known "intellectual property", that is, brand names that audiences will be aware of before they go to the cinema. "Steered by the shareholders and moneymen," wrote Wendy Ide in The Observer recently, "studios are more likely than ever to invest in the familiar, supposedly safe bets such as remakes of proven properties, franchises, movie adaptations of board and video games – anything, in fact, with a degree of name recognition."
Cruise and his contemporaries have that name recognition. In the 1980s, they showcased their personas in so many different roles that they became intellectual property in their own right. "You went to see the new Arnie film," re De Semleyn, "whatever character he was playing." The next generation of actors haven't had the chance to turn themselves into brand names in the same way. The luckiest of them may have made their fortunes in superhero franchises, but they haven't been able to progress beyond specific lycra-wearing, world-saving characters. Would anyone go to see a film just because it had Tom Holland in it? How can viewers learn to love his own persona when he is locked into so many Spider-Man and Avengers movies? "Younger actors are starring in franchises whose brands overshadow them," explained Patches, "[whereas] older actors have familiar star power and are reliable global box-office draws."
SonyThere have been attempts to build non-superhero action franchises around younger actors, especially actors named Chris, eg The Gray Man with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, Extraction with Chris Hemsworth, and The Tomorrow War with Chris Pratt. But none of these has taken off, partly because they debuted on streaming services rather than at cinemas. "There's so much content being pumped out that it's really hard for one franchise or star to stand out," De Semlyen says. "In the 80s, a blockbuster could be in the cinema all summer and people would keep talking about it. That's different from turning on your TV and seeing Chris Hemsworth killing 1,000 people."
Still, while we're feeling sorry for those youthful actors who can't establish themselves as action superstars, we should spare a thought for those less youthful actors who can't establish themselves as anything else. As far as mainstream cinema is concerned, they have almost no option but to sign up for action movies, because Hollywood has pretty much abandoned the quieter mid-budget films that might have allowed them to deliver dialogue without throwing bad guys through windows at the same time. The John Wick series, with Keanu Reeves (58), has demonstrated that action movies are currently the only way to revive an ailing career. Just think about Cruise. He can get audiences to watch him sprinting along the top of a train, but could he persuade them to watch him in a gentle romantic comedy or a political drama? That might be a mission impossible, even for him.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is on general release
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