The Art of Making Do: Ageing Recent-to-Action Stars in Hollywood-Style French Action Cinema

Since the mid-2000s there has been a marked resurgence in Hollywood action films featuring older male heroes, showcasing stars ranging from their mid-fifties into their seventies. A core element of this ‘geri-action’ cycle has been the emergence of late-career action turns by ageing Hollywood actors in globally successful French-produced, Hollywood-style action films. Part of a larger trend in French cinema towards the production of films in a distinctly commercial register, the ‘globalised’ aesthetic of French action film cannily mimics Hollywood action film style and aesthetics. These French-produced geri-action films similarly feature protagonists who forcefully struggle against perceived threats to the cultural position of traditional (white) masculinities and professional and paternal redundancy. Yet they also showcase deep-seated European anxieties about the threat of porous borders, immigration, and social change, presaging a later shift in the cycle in Hollywood. Focusing on films that have received comparatively less scholarly attention, this chapter examines the productive confluence of lower budget French-produced geri-action films and their ageing recent-to-action stars. These films depend on their stars to fortify their globalised Hollywood aesthetic and the stars’ personae permit efficiencies such as clipped pacing. At the same time, budget constraints enhance the action performance of recent-to-action stars as unadorned, visceral and authentic-feeling. The films often stage fight sequences in confined, everyday spaces with ageing heroes who must creatively ‘make do’ with available objects. Equally, the greater reliance on stunt coordination and choreography, editing and sound design for ageing and less experienced action performers makes them appear to move faster and hit harder. Taken together, French-produced geri-action and its recent-to-action stars have transformed not only who stars in ‘Hollywood’ action cinema, but who produces it.