Today’s biggest action stars are the same actors from the 1980s and 90s

THE biggest names in action movies today are virtually identical to the 1980s: Stallone and Schwarzenegger. Here’s why.

“I’M too old for this s***,” Danny Glover famously complained in Lethal Weapon.

That was back in 1987. These days, the only way to be too old for any s*** is to be laid out in a pine box.

Age is just a number, at least when it comes to action heroes. Grab a juice box and take a hike, Taylor Lautner. The biggest names in action movies today are virtually identical to the 1980s and early 1990s. Sylvester Stallone is 67. Arnold Schwarzenegger is 66. Liam Neeson is 61. Wee pup Bruce Willis is 58.

The latest throwback is 59-year-old Kevin Costner, enjoying a career resurgence after the success of TV’s Hatfields & McCoys in 2012.

He showed up earlier this year as a CIA handler in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and on Friday (in the US) he’s front and centre in 3 Days to Kill, as a spy who is blackmailed into taking one final mission in order to receive a cure for his terminal disease.

News_Rich_Media: 3 Days to Kill

Co-writer/producer Adi Hasak says building the story around an older actor made sense.

“He’s a man who has been caught up in a cycle of violence, and he had to be old enough to look back on his life,” Hasak says. “The cool thing with Neeson and Costner is that they’re playing their age. They’re wise, older men with the history of their lives on their faces.”

Plus, one guesses, these guys don’t mind working around all those loud gunshots; their hearing probably went years ago.

And 3 Days to Kill is just one of many new thrillers featuring the senior set. Bruce Willis will show up this summer in the sequel A Dame to Kill For, reprising his detective role from 2005’s Sin City. After that, he’s got three more action movies on the horizon for 2014.

Neeson plays an air marshal in Non-Stop, opening Feb. 28 in the US (Feb. 27 in Australia). Later this year, he’ll return in Taken 3 — presuming the writers can find someone else in his life to be kidnapped. (“Cousin Clarence, listen carefully. You’re going to be taken.”)

News_Image_File: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jaimie Alexander in a scene from “The Last Stand”.

Schwarzenegger has the DEA actioner Sabotage March 28, and he will reprise his role as hard case Trench in August’s The Expendables 3. The third instalment in the meta-action franchise also stars Stallone, Harrison Ford (71), Dolph Lundgren (56), Wesley Snipes (51), Mel Gibson (58) and pretty much every action dude who can still lift a gun.

As the poster for Schwarzenegger’s sheriff shoot ’em-up The Last Stand proclaimed, “Retirement is for sissies.”

There is a precedent for veteran actors punching and kicking their way into old age, of course. John Wayne continued to play the strong, silent enforcer well into his 60s in Brannigan and Rooster Cogburn.

What’s unusual now is just how many ageing action stars there are — and how few younger actors are waiting in the wings.

The question is, how exactly do these old timers continue to get so much work in an industry that’s supposedly obsessed with youth?

The reasons are, not surprisingly, economic.

News_Image_File: Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone and Randy Couture in “The Expendables”.

In her book Sleepless in Hollywood, producer Lynda Obst details the way that Hollywood has become more dependent on foreign ticket sales in the wake of the DVD-market collapse. Overseas box-office used to account for 20 per cent of a film’s revenue. Today, it’s up to 70 per cent.

And guess what? Foreign audiences love the “stars of the immediate past,” as the book says. That means the names that were big in the ’80s and ’90s, not the hot up-and-comers. And action is a universal language that can be enjoyed around the world, which is not always the case with comedies or dialogue-heavy dramas.

Take Schwarzenegger and Stallone’s Escape Plan. The 2013 movie earned just $25 million stateside, leading many critics to label it a bomb. But it earned $110 million overseas. Likewise, last year’s A Good Day to Die Hard fizzled in the US with just $67 million, but raked in $237 million from foreign territories.

News_Rich_Media: Escape plan sees the coming together of Stallone and Schwarzenegger who end up in a in a high security prison.Movie-audience demographics are also changing, with more older folks heading to the theatre.

“That’s the big secret that no one is talking about,” Hasak says. “For someone like Costner, it’s a win. The people who remember him fondly are the people who are going to movies right now.”

According to research by the Motion Picture Association of America, the number of moviegoers ages 40 to 60+ who went to the theatre once a month or more jumped from 10.5 million to 13.7 million.

Neeson, who was nominated for a 1994 Oscar for Schindler’s List, is candid about the reasons he switched to action movies after Taken hit big.

“Because they’re dumb enough to offer them to me,” the actor said at a Toronto Film Festival press conference last year. “It’s like, I’m 61 years of age. I mean, come on. It’s a joke. It’s like [mimes talking into phone], ‘How much? OK, I’ll be there.’ ”

Neeson’s windfall might be about more than money, however. He and his shoot ’em-up contemporaries continue to snag these roles, in part, because there are apparently few young actors that filmmakers would rather offer them to.

Rising stars are more risky overseas, and the younger actors themselves seem less eager to be pigeonholed into one particular genre. It’s very different now than in the 1980s, when Stallone would make and remake one type of action flick.

Youngsters like Chris Evans and Channing Tatum star in movies such as Captain America and White House Down. But they also film comedies and rom-coms and indies. Jeremy Renner played a spy in the Bourne franchise, but he also snagged a lead in the Oscar-nominated American Hustle. To Stallone, on the other hand, “branching out” means blowing up something differently.

News_Image_File: John McClane (Bruce Willis) and son Jack (Jai Courtney) in “A Good day to Die Hard”.

And we viewers like our heroes vulnerable. Weary and a little bit broken-down are favourable qualities. It’s less fun to have a fit 23-year-old defeating bad guys. We want John McClane cracking wise and limping around Nakatomi Plaza with bloodied feet in the Die Hard movies.

“Instead of ageing being a disease, it’s now portrayed as faster and stronger. It’s no longer a hindrance. It’s seen as a source of wisdom,” says Norma Jones, a Kent State University graduate student studying stereotypes of older movie characters. “Cocoon was one of the only movies from the ’80s that dealt with ageing, and you needed alien pods for [the senior citizens] to be viable.”

Off-camera, perhaps Schwarzenegger and his pals could use a few of those life-invigorating alien pods themselves.

“We had to do a lot of running and jumping and climbing,” the former California governor said at Comic-Con while promoting The Expendables 2. “At night, you had to put a lot of ice on your knees and hips. We got cortisone shots every day.”

“We move a little slower,” Stallone added. “Your body is like a machine, and the parts wear out.”

Trainer Harley Pasternak, who has worked with Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Pattinson, says the main issue with training older actors is that their bodies don’t recover as fast. As the body ages, hormone levels, including testosterone, drop.

“I doubt a lot of these men would look the way they do without a pharmaceutical assist,” Pasternak says.

News_Image_File: Sylvester Stallone in a scene from “The Expendables”.

That means taking human growth hormone, as Stallone has admitted, or injecting steroids, as Schwarzenegger once did.

But how much longer can their careers — and knees — hold on? How much longer can audiences suspend disbelief that someone who’s eligible for Social Security can take out a roomful of 30-year-olds?

“After the novelty is over, it’s a little silly seeing a man in his 60s with these big muscles running and jumping,” Hasak admits.

Jean-Claude van Damme, 53, was recently asked if he and the other Expendables would ever hang it up.

“You have to keep on going,” he told Next Movie. “It’s what we have inside of us that’s how we became famous, and it will never die.”

As for 67-year-old Danny Glover, he’ll be fighting bad guys this fall with his pal Danny Trejo, 69, in Bad Asses. Glover even scores a great sound bite in the trailer: “Ain’t no 20-year-old got reflexes like that.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.