TOM Cruise is back at the age of 59 to play Maverick in the new Top Gun film. Sadly, in Hollywood being much too old is no obstacle to your career, as these ill-advised roles show…
Terminator Genisys
Arnie looks totally and utterly knackered. He doesn’t need a sit-down and a nice cup of tea, more like a year’s solid sleep. It could just be his age – 68 – but it’s surely compounded by decades of bodybuilding. Or it’s possible he tried to understand the film’s vast number of plot holes and it sucked a couple of decades of life out of him.
A View to a Kill
Roger Moore was 58 while love interest Tanya Roberts was 30. His age is really underlined by the fact that Bond dressed like your dad after a trip to C&A – a Bergerac-style leather jacket and what appear to be polyester ‘smart casual’ trousers. They may as well have given Bond a garden shed to remove any last traces of cool.
Grease
Stockard Channing famously played a teenager while 34. One of the less egregious examples because, unlike today’s ageing male stars, she doesn’t look as if she’ll need oxygen if she gets up too quickly. Confused younger viewers thought the American school system must have a very inflexible policy of keeping you back a year if you were rubbish at maths.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Harrison Ford really looks his age (64) in this, to the point where you feel it’s a bit cruel what they’re putting him through. Humiliatingly, Indy has battled Nazis and death cult maniacs, but now the greatest danger is having a nasty fall like your nan. The fact that the rest of the film is utter, utter, utter, utter shit doesn’t help.
Saturn 3
Enormous folly on the part of 64-year-old egomaniac Kirk Douglas, who’s cast as the lover of 33-year-old Farrah Fawcett, one of the biggest sex symbols of the 70s. It’s certainly a memorable film, in entirely the wrong way, for the creepy shagging-your-daughter overtones and nudity usually only seen in the shower of an old folk’s home.
The Mummy
In a foreshadowing of the age-related dissonance likely to feature in the new Top Gun, Tom Cruise is 22 years older than co-star Annabelle Wallis. It’s not enough to ruin the film on its own – Russell Crowe as Dr Jekyll is there to do that, in a confusing dog’s dinner of unrelated characters.
The Expendables
Some would call it an ‘entertaining callback to the heyday of action movies’. Other would call it a ‘braindead cash-grab by a bunch of past-it old twats’. We couldn’t possibly comment. However, when Jason Statham (54) looks like a foetus in comparison to his co-stars, you think it might have been better to do a remake of Last of the Summer Wine.
