Five Actors That Are Way Too Old For This Shit

arnold schwarzenegger

The full-length trailer for the next Terminator film, Genisys, has landed, and with it our first real glimpses at ageing action relic Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to the role of the world's favourite walking, talking killing machine (and surrogate father figure), the original Model 101 T-800.

Now, clearly, the inexorable march of time has been doing the Charleston all over Arnie's meat-sack in the three full decades since the original film's release, and the once spry, young murderbot is now dangerously leathery and grey to the point that, when he says "I'll be back" before swan-diving out of a helicopter, you're no longer really entirely certain that he will be back, especially if he forgot to bring his heart medication.

As you can see in the trailer, there's even a scene where they've actually Photoshopped '80s Arnie into the frame (in what appears to be an old-self vs young-self showdown), instead of just giving Joseph Gordon-Levitt sweet contact lenses like they did to pass him off as young Bruce Willis in Looper. But that's fine — alternate universes and old robots are apparently pretty key to the plot of Genisys. Yes, Arnie might be getting on in years, but at least the film isn't totally trying to shy away from the fact its lead is a more realistic dinosaur than you'll see in Jurassic World.

clint eastwood

Remember In The Line Of Fire, the early-'90s thriller featuring John Malkovich alongside a then-already-63-year-old Clint Eastwood, who spends much of the film grunting and squinting out of his left eye and eventually making out with Rene Russo? He was too old to be playing tough-guy charisma factories then.

By 2000, he should have well and truly been occupying the sorts of roles reserved now for people like John Lithgow (who quite happily seems to have fallen into post-prime paternal-role life), not being shot into space with Tommy Lee Jones to fix an old Russian satellite. Although he's since spent much of his time behind the camera rather than in front of it, one can't help but feel that Eastwood clung to the ideal of being Hollywood's scowling standard just a little longer than necessary.

bruce willis

As much as "Oh, man, isn't John McClane so over the hill now?" is a crucial part of the narrative of the last two Die Hard films (and, to an extent, even the third, back in '95), the fact that both Live Free Or Die Hard and A Good Day To Die Hard paint McClane less as super-lucky cowboy than unstoppable death machine means that the entire underlying notion that Willis' iconic terrorist-killing cop is in any kind of danger as a result of being wearied by time has, for the past two films at least, been out the window.

That's a franchise that's completely lost its way, purely by virtue of having run on way too long. The tag line for A Good Day... was "Like Father. Like Son. Like Hell" — implying that McClane finds himself in these situations by nature, completely erasing the "wrong place, wrong time, right guy" mentality of the first two flicks. These days, you never fear for McClane, because despite his clearly advanced years and growing physical limitations, the idea that he's not going to come out on top is nothing more than a speck in the rear-view mirror by the time he's shooting bad guys through his own shoulder bullet-holes.

sylvester stallone

Another of the '80s-era action crop that has been scratching at relevance since the '90s, Sylvester Stallone at first seemed like he would be gracefully acknowledging the unstoppable advance of age, with the surprisingly poignant, damage-reversing Rocky Balboa providing an unexpectedly strong finish to a franchise left with one of the most depressing (and depressingly bad) previous final entries in movie history. Hell, even his involvement in The Expendables franchise is at least a knowing wink towards the career challenges faced by he and his genre compatriots as they get older — all of which makes the imminence of Rambo: Last Blood so totally bewildering.

By the time Last Blood hits, Stallone will be 70 years old. And this is, of course, after 2008's already ill-advised Rambo, which came at the height of a few-year-long spate of "20 years later..."  sequels that picked up stories of protagonists whose retirement years nobody really needed to see. Look, we spent three films coming to know and love John Rambo as a loose-cannon ex-military man who doesn't take shit from anybody, no matter how many tanks they have; we don't need that vision corrupted by spending half an hour watching him sell snakes to villagers and act as the local river ferry service.

jackie chan

After originally announcing in 2012 that he would be retiring from action films specifically because he felt he was getting too old to keep up, Jackie Chan reneged and decided that, no, he wouldn't be retiring from action movies entirely. Instead, he decided that maybe he'd ease up on the stunts and start looking after his body a little better, which is a realisation that a now-60-year-old man should have come to on his own a long time ago. 

Still, like so many of his fellow Expendables castmates, Chan's still not totally stepping aside for the next generation of gym/dojo-bound rock-men, perhaps believing that a sequel to The Tuxedo, which is just like the first film only now he's fifteen years older and maybe has a mortgage to deal with, is in order before he can truly hang up the black belt and call it a good day.