OPINION

CRITICAL MASS: Some country for old men — ‘Geri-action’ trend continues with big stars as old heroes in low-budget films

Jeff Bridges and friends star in the FX series “The Old Man.”
Jeff Bridges and friends star in the FX series “The Old Man.”


You might assume that the chief protagonist of the FX series "The Old Man" is the old man.

After all, Dan Chase, the former CIA asset who has been hiding out from the agency for 30 years after apparently going rogue during the Soviet-Afghan War (I'm not sure the series is following the same basic plot of the 2017 Thomas Perry novel it's based on) is played by 72-year-old Jeff Bridges. Chase is somewhere north of his mid-60s. Hence, he's kind of old.

But 76-year-old John Lithgow plays FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Harold Harper, who is Chase's contemporary, probably at least a year or so older based on the relationship they had during the Soviet-Afghan War. Harper has been a kind of surrogate father to Chase's daughter, Emily (Alia Shawkat), who he knows as Angela Adams. So he's another "old man."

Then, by the show's sixth episode. it becomes clear that a mysterious figure named Morgan Bote (played by 90-year-old Joel Grey), mentored both Chase and Harper and, at Chase's request, arranged to place Emily/Angela with Harper (without his knowing of her relationship to Chase). So he's really the "old man" — that's how Chase and Harper refer to him, and he seems to be the puppet master pulling all the strings.

The whole point of a twisty spy series like "The Old Man" is that nothing is as it seems; Chase is just one of many aliases the protagonist has used over the years. As far as I can tell, the Bote character hasn't surfaced in any of the flashback sequences of the series (in which Bill Heck convincingly plays a younger Dan Chase, even though a lot of us can remember what Bridges looked like in the '80s) so we don't yet know the exact nature of the relationship between these characters or why — at the end of episode six — Bote's henchmen kidnap Emily/Angela, other than it serves to bring Chase and Harper together with the common goal of rescuing their daughter.

We get that the show is about fatherhood as well as running around the world trying to kill former Afghan resistance leader Faraz Hamzad (played as a young man by Pej Vahdat; we've yet to see the old man version of Hamzad) who is seeking revenge on Chase for cuckolding and otherwise betraying him during the conflict with the Soviets all those years ago.

Looking at it from Hamzad's perspective, we can understand why he's angry — Chase swooped in and stole away Hamzad's wife (Leem Lubany) who was also spying on Hamzad for the Russians (though she says she's only doing it to weaken his rival warlords and pave the way for his becoming ultimate leader of Afghanistan after the Russians are banished). With Harper's help, Chase spirited her off to America where she lived as Abbey Chase (as an older woman she's played by Hiam Abbass) until she developed dementia and died a few years before the events of the series. (Confused? That's exactly what they want.)

Anyway, Hamzad apparently put everything in motion when he decided to settle his score against Chase. Apparently he also has some sort of connection to Bote, who helped him facilitate an attack on Chase via Harper (who obviously has mixed feelings about his old buddy). If and when the present-day timeline Hamzad emerges from the shadows, that will give us yet another old man.

All this is ridiculous if you just take it as a "and then this happens" narrative. But we're not supposed to think very hard about the plot machinations of "The Old Man"; we're just supposed to enjoy Bridges, Lithgow and Grey (and 58-year-old Amy Brenneman as Chase's love interest/Stockholm Syndrome-suffering kidnap victim) as they race around the world being super-competent, outwitting and occasionally overpowering highly trained assassins, spies, thugs and security forces.

This is just a TV show where anything a screenwriter imagines can be made to happen. In real life, the filming of "The Old Man" was interrupted for a year while Bridges battled Hodgkin's lymphoma and covid-19. Reportedly there were times during filming when the actor couldn't stand on his own for more than 20 or 30 seconds at a time. Which makes some of the intense and naturalistic fight scenes — including an especially brutal 12-minute one that comes in 47 minutes into the first episode — simultaneously fascinating and difficult.

It is hard to kill someone with your hands. Even when you're experienced.

  photo  Liam Neeson shows off his particular set of skills in “Taken” (2008).
 
 
'GERI-ACTION' TREND

You can say the "geri-action" trend started with Liam Neeson, who was 56 when he portrayed fiercely protective and retired CIA operative Bryan Mills of the "particular set of skills," in Luc Besson's "Taken." That foray into revenge-movie pulp transformed him from actorly presence (see "Schindler's List," "The Mission," "Husbands and Wives") to bankable action star.

Now 70, Neeson has expressed the desire to retire from the genre, but he continues to pump out a couple of tough-guy action thrillers per year.

If Neeson's transition is seen as an inflection point, maybe it's helpful to recognize that Clint Eastwood revisited his Dirty Harry Callahan character in 1988's "The Dead Pool" when he was 58. He was 63 when he was chasing Kevin Costner in "A Perfect World." John Wayne was John Wayne in all his movies; he wore his persona his entire career. And Frank Sinatra was 73 when he was offered the lead in a movie called "Die Hard"; after he turned it down the studio turned to a 33-year-old television star, Bruce Willis, and paid him a then-unprecedented $5 million.

Willis played McClane for the fifth and final time (unless you count a 2020 car battery commercial) in 2013's "A Good Day to Die Hard," a film less inspired than its self-parodying title might lead you to believe.

He maintained his tough-guy credentials until earlier this year, when his family announced he was retiring at the age of 67 after being diagnosed with aphasia, an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions.

In recent years, Willis had adopted a business plan of taking small roles (usually less than 15 minutes onscreen) in low-budget independent action-thriller films, most of which went straight to video, for about $2 million a pop. After his announcement, some of those who worked with him came forward to say he had appeared confused on set and did not seem to know why he was there, and that he had to be fed lines through an earpiece.

While Willis' experience is particularly poignant, he's hardly the only Hollywood leading man who has sought refuge in quick and dirty action projects — John Cusack spent a couple of days in Little Rock filming "Pursuit," which was released earlier this year. Steven Seagal, Cuba Gooding Jr., Wesley Snipes, Mickey Rourke, Nicolas Cage, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham and John Travolta are all regulars on the direct-to-video circuit — their names are enough to garner enough clicks and late-night rentals to justify their fees.

These actors are worth their fees not only because they can make these poverty-row productions profitable, but because they can get them made. One way to convince investors is to have a big name attached to your production, even if that big name is well past its sell-by date.

Audiences retain plenty of residual goodwill for actors they admired when they were 12 years old — if "Vision Quest" (or "Full Metal Jacket") was a seminal movie for you growing up, it's really cool to see Matthew Modine on nostalgia-soaked "Stranger Things."

As long as a generation that valued movies has economic hegemony over the culture, we're going to make a place for our old heroes.

Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger will always have jobs as long as they're willing to reprise their most famous characters. Rocky Balboa, John Rambo, Han Solo, the Terminator — we associate specific actors with these roles and resist the idea of anyone else ever playing them, even as the originators age, which you would think would be especially problematic for Ah-nuld's robotic alter-ego. De-aging CGI arrived like the cavalry to help with that problem; in the future, or maybe next week, all you'll need to do is a full-body scan of a performer to keep a forever young star on tap.

  photo  Bruce Willis plays John McClane in “A Good Day to Die Hard” (2013).
 
 
BABY-BOOMER DRIVEN

Movies are more important to baby boomers than to younger demographics, who tend to be more platform-neutral and more involved in gaming and internet-based diversions than their elders. (And less inclined to spend discretionary income on overpriced popcorn and reclining seats.) Most moviegoers are 45 years old and older, people who still remember when Netflix's primary business was renting DVDs through the mail.

This audience came of age in the '70s and '80s, when the blockbuster model that originated with the success of "Jaws" and "Star Wars" met with some cool advances in technology that made the big dumb action movie not only possible but inevitable.

Add in the revival of Cold War tensions and the hangover of the unsatisfying end to the American adventure in Vietnam and you get movies like "Rambo: First Blood" (1982), the Chuck Norris-starred "Lone Wolf McQuade" (1983), John Milius' "Red Dawn" (1984), "Lethal Weapon" (1987) and "Die Hard."

America's place in the world is even more uncertain today than it was in the Reagan era, so it's hardly surprising that these films — and their derivatives — still have currency. But why aren't younger stars — the Chris Evanses and Chris Hemsworths and Bradley Coopers of the world — moving into them?

A big reason is likely the success of comic-book movies, which work like black holes, sucking in and devouring the biggest stars. With these films, it's the characters that matter more than the actors who are playing them.

How many Spider-Men have there been? Someday, we'll have a new actor playing Tony Stark, someday a new Thor. You can understand why some actors — like Cusack, who says his reluctance to "put on the tights" and appear in a comic book film has all but forced him into the kind of roles he now takes on — might want to avoid the genre, either on careerist or aesthetic grounds.

You can't blame anyone for taking on a superhero role — the money is generational — but maybe we can understand that the sort of actor required for those kind of roles is different from the sort of tough-guy everyman who populated those '80s actioners. Sure, Stallone and Schwarzenegger were walking special-effects pneumatic muscle guys, but most of those films got a lot of traction out of having the lead actors survive their beatings and prevail, bloodied but unbowed.

Remember Danny Glover as Roger Murtaugh whining that he was getting "too old" for "this s***" in "Lethal Weapon"? That character was 50, looking at imminent retirement. These days Tom Cruise can fly jet fighters at 56 (when he made "Top Gun: Maverick"; he's 60 now), and play football on the beach with the young studs.

Now we watch Jeff Bridges, the septuagenarian, brutally engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a FBI agent half his age.

And ultimately winning.

  photo  Helen Mirren stars in “Red” (2010).
 
 
THIS TOO SHALL PASS

As Jerry Seinfeld says, "No, I don't think it will last."

Nature will have something to say about how many "Rocky" films Stallone can make. The only thing we can know is that this too shall pass. We've had weeds overtake the movie theaters before. There are more last picture shows in our dwindling future.

Sure, it's wishful and not reflective of the way things really are, but no one wants the movies to be a mirror anyway. We don't want or need accuracy; we want and need a little comfort and reassurance. If you want to be discomfited and made afraid, go read some subtitles. Go find some Fassbinder.

Maybe we can count age diversity as a good thing, though it hasn't benefited older female actors as much as it has some men. Helen Mirren got to wield a machine gun at age 64 in 2010's "Red." Better that than the subtle infantilization of the elderly that we often see, even in films that bear an AARP seal of approval like 2011's "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel."

Better this than "Dirty Grandpa."

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