Are We Facing a Critical Shortage of Good Male Action Leads?
If you were making Die Hard today, who would you cast? What about Top Gun?
Seriously! Last night I finally saw Pacific Rim—the Top Gun of giant robots—and as great as it was (pretty fucking great!), it's hard not to watch it and think about how much better it'd have been with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer playing the Maverick and Iceman roles, instead of Bland Englishman-With-American-Accent White Guy and Bland Australian White Guy.
There are a lot of 40ish—and older—men who are great action leads right now, guys who came up as action stars or somehow wound up there in the back half of their careers. But as you look to the future, who are we left with to star in our action movies for the years to come? The bland guy from Captain America? The bland guy from Star Trek? Shia fucking LeBeouf? [Makes face]
In other words: Have we reached peak action star? (Maura Magazine has wondered this same thing.) Let's discuss.