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In the wake of The Expendables second installment, its starting to feel like we're slowly sinking into the film industries' era of "The Last Action Heroes". While we continue to somewhat desperately celebrate aging action mega-leads that we've familiarized ourselves with on a first-name basis--Arnold, Sly, Bruce, Van-Damme--audiences are refusing to absorb an equivalent of the cinematic modern day action hero.
As opposed to platforming up-and-coming, blockbuster action stars (which are few and far between in comparison to the era of the '80s and '90s), the action vets of yesteryear are not only still getting cast but repurposed.
In this past fall's sci-fi film Looper, Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt play older and younger version of the same character, featuring Gordon-Levitt with heavy, face-morphing prosthetics and Willis with...well, no physiognomonic alterations at all.
Granted the appeal of the idea was to make the two characters, representing one man at different ages, look as convincingly alike as possible. However, the lack of adjustments to Willis' features defines him as the tributed icon of the film and the primary model of the character.
But why wouldn't that be the case...he is the actual "action hero" of the film (see post #4). .
What's so exceptionally (and allegorically) poignant about Looper is the paralleling camaraderie and conflict between Willis and Gordon-Levitt's characters and what it subtly represents throughout the process of the generational "movie star" transition. While both versions of the character have a dependency on each other to stay alive, one of them still has to eventually step out of the light (well, in regards to the film's plot, "die") in order for the other to thrive and exist.
-MTK
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