The world is still full of big fans of action movies.
Top Gun: Maverick
has finished its run in theaters with nearly $1.5 billion in revenue (first on the list this year, though
Avatar 2
is still in theaters).
Tom Cruise celebrated his 60th birthday in 2022.
Far from thinking about retirement, two weeks ago he shared a video in which he detailed how one of the sequences of the first part of the seventh installment of
Mission Impossible
had been recorded , in which he jumped off a cliff in Norway from a motorcycle.
He did it, as always, by himself, without using specialists.
According to director Christopher McQuarrie, it is "the greatest stunt in the history of cinema."
Why at 60 Cruise is still jumping off cliffs in Norway?
It has been difficult for the cinema to find a generational replacement.
It is striking that a genre traditionally dominated by physical confrontations, chases, shootings and, ultimately, any form of intense violence, is led by actors who are around or even over 60. Only in 2022 have we seen Brad Pitt (59 years ) in
Bullet Train
, Liam Neeson (70) in
The Memory of a Murderer
and
The Mediator
, Mel Gibson (66) in
Mission Panama
, Sylvester Stallone (76) in
Samaritan
, Jeff Bridges (73) in
The Old Man
series , or Nicolas Cage (58) in
The unbearable weight of a huge talent
, where he also plays himself.
Other regulars of the genre who are passing through the third age are Denzel Washington (68), who in September of next year will star in the third part of
The Equalizer;
Keanu Reeves (58), who also premieres
John Wick 4 in 2023,
or
Harrison Ford
,
who at 80 years of age returns to put himself in the shoes of the most beloved archaeologist in the history of cinema for
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate,
which is expected for next summer.
01:42
Trailer for the movie 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate'
Harrison Ford announces detail of 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate' at a Disney fan event in September 2022. Photo: IMAGE GROUP LA (THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY VIA GETTY)
The advanced age of the actors in action movies has been the subject of debate in some media.
The journalist Noel Ceballos from GQ
magazine
, locates the birth of the "middle-aged hero cinema" (although we have already seen that this qualifier falls short for many) in one of the first scenes of the film
Revenge .
(2008).
Liam Neeson picks up the phone and says the following to his daughter's kidnapper: “If he lets her go right now, it's all over.
I will not look for him, nor will I persecute him.
But if he doesn't, I'll look for him, I'll find him and I'll kill him…”.
It is one of the most famous sequences in the film.
The daughter's kidnapper is just one of the 74 people Neeson will kill in his three-episode vengeful journey.
But it's also the starting point of his career as an action hero.
The actor who was nominated for an Oscar for
Schindler's List
(1993), at the age of 60, became the closest thing to a new action star that has come in the genre in recent years.
In
El Confidencial
, the journalist and writer Alberto Olmos wonders: "Why is a 60-year-old man chosen as the ideal actor to hit, jump from buildings, shoot Russians, and receive knifes and punches?"
After seeing
Nobody
, released in 2021, he came to the conclusion that gender is linked to a concept of masculinity that is incompatible with the actors of the new generations.
The implausible thing, he thinks, would be that young performers like Tom Holland or Timothée Chalamet would kill 50 people in a movie, "because nobody would believe it."
More information
Tom Holland: How a boy who was bullied at school became Spiderman
He calls
it retromasculinity
.
The protagonist of
Nobody
is Bob Odenkirk
(Better Call Saul , 57), a
softy
husband
unable to protect his family from a gang of thieves that breaks into his house.
“Overwhelmed by the degrading consequences of his tamed masculinity,” says Olmos, “the protagonist of
Nadie
begins to agonize morally.”
He has not behaved like a man.
His feeling of guilt makes him rediscover within himself the deep being of "the atavistic male".
From there, the film turns into a succession of shootouts.
"With a shotgun in each hand," Olmos writes, Odenkirk's character "rediscovers masculinity."
In the same article, he points out that "almost all these films resort to the same idea: a man who seems nondescript and lives like one of the others is actually a killing machine, retired FBI agent, hidden mobster or
hit man
on leave".
In short, a tragic event makes the stems of a traditional masculinity that remained hidden grow green in the old male.
Is it the longing for lost testosterone?
02:28
Trailer of the series 'The old man'
Jeff Bridges, in an instant from the series 'The Old Man'. Video: FOX
Michael Kimmel, a prestigious American sociologist specializing in gender studies, published in 2013 an essay entitled
Angry White Men
(Barlin Books).
In it, he analyzed how a series of profound changes of a social, cultural, political and economic nature had left many men anchored in an outdated idea of masculinity, with an internal sense of frustration and anger.
The text regained validity after the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential elections. The former president of the United States today found in the "humiliated" men the perfect target towards which to direct his famous
Make America Great Again
.
Following Trump's election, far-right groups like The Proud Boys have emerged, calling for a restoration of weakened traditional white masculinity.
The idea of a new Trumpian action man
It is not so far-fetched if we go back to the origins of the genre.
In his
Historia del cine
(Alliance, 2002), Sánchez Noriega affirms that each era generates its own myths and heroes, and the archetype of
Rambo
(1982)
It was the perfect reflection of the mentality of Ronald Reagan's USA: lone heroes, who take the law into their mighty hand and whose only enemy, in any case, are the public institutions, which never measure up to the seriousness of the situation.
The eighties was the golden age of action movies and actors like Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
All, according to Noriega, in profile "muscular hypermacho, on the verge of inhumanity."
The truth is that it was not at all strange to see Arnold Schwarzenegger breaking someone's neck on a plane, only to put sunglasses on his face and jokingly tell the flight attendant that his friend had fallen asleep.
Out of the initial list of sixty-year-old actors was Will Smith, who is actually 54 years old.
In 2020, he starred in the third installment of the Bad Boys
franchise
(in Spanish,
Two rebel policemen).
The film was third in the world collection list.
Just over a year later, Will Smith signed his death warrant in Hollywood when he delivered the most famous smack in recent memory to Chris Rock at the Oscars.
Social media and show business were unanimous in criticizing Smith's toxic masculinity (Rock had made a questionable joke about his wife).
The actor himself came to enter a rehabilitation clinic after the incident.
Shortly after, Sony Pictures announced that it was paralyzing the fourth installment of Bad Boys
indefinitely
, because of what happened.
The big question is: What would detective Mike Lowrey (Smith's character in the movie) have done if another man had dared to insult his wife?
You can follow ICON on
,
,
, or subscribe here to the
Newsletter
.