Liam Neeson and he-men of a certain age
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Actor Liam Neeson attends the premiere of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1" at Alice Tully Hall in Manhattan. (Nov. 15, 2010) Credit: Getty Images
This summer, 68-year-old Harrison Ford will be mixing it up with Old West-invading extraterrestrials in "Cowboys & Aliens." Next month, 67-year-old Robert De Niro will star in the action thriller "Limitless." When "The Expendables II" opens in 2012, the combined ages of its top five prospective stars, God willing, will be 291 years.
The landscape of recent motion pictures, in particular Manly Movies, looks increasingly like the last days of the dinosaurs.
The performers are graying (never literally, of course), the shooting and editing is getting tighter (to suggest, rather than capture, physical exertion) and if one were to compare the future of Hollywood He-Men to say, The Terminator, there would be few replacement parts in the warehouse. Who's coming along to fill the shoes of Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis - or even Liam Neeson, who opens Friday in the highbrow espionage thriller "Unknown"? Orlando Bloom? Yikes.
"There's Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy ['Inception'] is becoming a movie star, Christian Bale, a few others," said "Unknown" director Jaume Collet-Serra, who may be obliged to be pro-Neeson but still has a point. "It's hard to find an actor who has the physicality, the good looks, the charm all on top of being an amazing actor - that's the most important thing, but not always what people pay attention to."
True stars are ageless
It's largely a question of gravity. And money: The older stars still draw crowds. "They do," said Paul Dergarabedian, who tracks box office for the industry at Hollywood.com. "If the movie is cast properly, it doesn't matter if the actors are younger or older, as long as they can sell it onscreen."
He said that while plausibility is important, acknowledging the age differential has become a tactic, too. "I think 'Red' was a great example of a film that's taking the concept of the aging action star and putting it front and center," he said, citing the recent comedy thriller starring Willis, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich. "Sort of like 'The Expendables,' which kind of said, 'If one older action star can't bring people in, maybe five of them can.' " That film starred Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin and Mickey Rourke (plus an uncredited Willis and Schwarzenegger), cost $80 million, and has thus far made $274 million worldwide.
Neeson is not quite in that action-figure-inspiring groove. He's idiosyncratic - "an 'edge case' they call it in cyberworld," said Tim Appelo of The Hollywood Reporter, who writes its Oscar blog, The Race. "He's not typical. He got the Schindler part precisely because he had no firm persona," Appelo said, referring to Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."
"Spielberg wanted an actor who brought zero prior baggage to the part, so he could be completely mysterious and Schindler alone. There's a kind of heroic remoteness to Neeson."
Hero with a bad memory
That remote heroism certainly benefits Neeson's performance as "Unknown's" Dr. Martin Harris, who arrives in Berlin for a biotech conference, is saved from a watery car wreck by his plucky taxi driver (Diane Kruger) and, after a brief hospitalization, returns to a wife (January Jones) who doesn't seem to know who he is. The plot is part Hitchcock, the action owes something to "Bourne," and the star is 58 years old.
Which makes him younger than some of these guys (Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Robert De Niro are in their 60s; Eastwood, 80). But old enough to give pause when he's cast - vis-a-vis the hallowed Hollywood tradition - opposite actresses as young as Jones, 33, or Kruger, 34.
"I find that very strange at times," Kruger said with a laugh. "And it was very important to Liam and myself - and I have to give credit to the studio - that there was no real romance between those characters. It's more like Natalie Portman and Jean Reno , two people who come together at one point in their life."
She agreed, however, that it would be tough to find younger actors who could play a character with as much psychic baggage as Martin Harris. "They could play it," she said, "but I think it would be a different movie, a lighter movie. Liam brings experience; he's of a certain age, but he doesn't even have to say anything - every line in his face gives a depth to the film. He's not the 25-year-old punk-rock hot guy - not that I don't like watching those boys. But with Liam, you know there's always something underlying the story you're about to watch."
Who from the younger ranks is going to take over as the movie hero? "I used to think Jason Statham," Dergarabedian said, "but he's not that young anymore. Ben Foster? The actor has to be believable doing the things he's doing onscreen. Matt Damon has been very credible in the 'Bourne' series and Daniel Craig as Bond, but they're both a little older, too. Hard to think of someone in their 20s? There might be that guy from 'G.I. Joe.' What's his name?" Exactly.
Five unmistakably entertaining films
BY JOHN ANDERSON, Special to Newsday
The mistaken-identity gambit is so common you can hardly imagine cinema without it. As with "Unknown," it can be found in thrillers ("The Wrong Man," "The 39 Steps" and, more recently, the "Bourne" trilogy). But it's also been used in comedies ("The Man With One Red Shoe," "Life of Brian"), musicals (all those early Astaire-Rogers films), kid movies ("The Parent Trap," 1961 and 1998), crime documentaries ("The Thin Blue Line") and the five superb examples below, all which show that sense of self is overrated, at least in terms of creating narrative tension:
THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940) - Charlie Chaplin, as an amnesiac Jewish war vet-turned-barber, is mistaken for Adolf Hitler - aka Adenoid Hynkel - in Chaplin's satirical send-up of fascism and the first major film to take on the Third Reich. Chaplin's first sound film co-stars Paulette Goddard and Jack Oakie (as Benzino Napaloni).
NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) - Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill can't get anyone to believe he's not George Kaplan, including the two thugs who pluck him out of the Plaza Hotel bar or the evildoers (James Mason, Martin Landau) who keep trying to kill him. Eva Marie Saint and Leo G. Carroll co-star in what is perhaps Hitchcock's most stylish suspense thriller.
BEING THERE (1979) - Chance, gardener and simpleton, becomes Chauncey Gardiner, celebrity and pundit, when his imbecile utterances about horticulture are interpreted as profound. A caustic commentary on subjective interpretation and political leadership, it was directed by Hal Ashby, co-written by Jerzy Kosinski, co-stars Shirley MacLaine and Jack Warden and was the late Peter Sellers' last real starring role.
DAVE (1993) - Presidential impersonator Dave Kovic (Kevin Kline) has to take his act nationwide when he's enlisted to fill in for stroked-out chief executive Bill Mitchell, in Ivan Reitman's politically astute comedy and takeoff on Mark Twain's "The Prince and the Pauper." Sigourney Weaver, Frank Langella, Kevin Dunn and Ving Rhames co-star.
THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998) - The Dude (Jeff Bridges) is mistaken for a wealthy paraplegic with the same last name (David Huddleston), a confusion that leads to threats, beatings and the spilling of beverages, in what has become the Coen brothers' calling-card cult comedy.
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