Narratives of cultural and professional redundancy: Ageing action stardom and the 'geri-action' film

Focusing on The Expendables films, I identify the importance of discourses of professional and cultural redundancy in 'geri-action', an emergent subgenre of Hollywood action film that has revitalised the careers of ageing action stars such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. These redundancies, which hold long-standing significance in 1980s action film, are compounded in geri-action by advanced age and diminished physical capacity. In geri-action, the spectacle of once idealised, muscled bodies is concealed and displaced onto oversized guns, fetishised vehicles and younger action bodies. However much geri-action resists 1980s action stars' use-by dates, it ultimately admits physical and generic exhaustion.