Pathaan, Gadar 2 and Jawan: Old is becoming gold as the action genre turns to veterans

What’s age got to do with it, eh? Hindi cinema’s two biggest hits since the pandemic began have been delivered by a beloved superstar in his late 50s and a returning star in his mid-sixties. Though there are few similarities between Gadar2 and Pathaan, both focus in tellingly different ways on nationalistic messaging. In both, men either save the country or make a stand for it. No two films, however, could be as tonally distant as these two action blockbusters. The former is a more hardened, nostalgia heavy sequel to the rustic charms of an original. SRK’s  _Pathaan_ on the other hand is a stylish travelogue with parlour tricks from the world of espionage. Both, however, have one thing in common. Their leading men are both ageing actors, in some way rechristened to play the action hero. Ever since Liam Neeson whispered those meme-worthy words into the phone in Taken, something shifted in our perception of the action hero. Previously considered the preserve of youthful, agile men who also exhibited the knack for some of the more risqué cinematic challenges – doing their own action -  the action genre of late has been revitalised by men who predictably aren’t as light-footed as the camera would have us believe. Tom Cruise, who celebrated his sixty-first birthday this year, is a bit of an exception to this rule because he insists on doing the reckless things that action heroes, at one point of time, earned their bidding by. Moreover, Cruise doesn’t exactly practice martial arts or some sophisticated grammar of combat. He merely uses machines to manufacture cinematic lore. CGI and technology have of course only added to the toolkit here. Hindi cinema’s evolving perception of the action film owes much of its knowhow to the southern film industries where actors like Thalaiva – most recently in Jailer - himself, continue to essay stylised, combative men who pulverise entire gangs and groups by chiming through them like a cord plucking itself into position on the harp. It’s effortless, without maybe an ounce of sweat, and that kind of is the point. In Vikram, Kamal Hassan, played a not too dissimilar role as an aged former agent who takes on goons with guns and some staple machoism, that is now the stuff of slow-motion Instagram reels. The very idea of the slow moving camera resonates with that of the ageing actor, a symphony, made through mutual admiration. Not everything exhilarating, cinema says has to be the product of callisthenic exceptionalism. You can be an action star, without the freakish fitness of a Tiger Shroff, or even the rugged, brute appeal of a Yash. There is a caveat to this trend as well. Action itself is a form of de-aging, a manipulative ruse that bewitches audiences into believing that men, as long as the camera submits to them, can get away with anything. You could, like Deol, evidentially stiff as a rock, or like Khan, ripped but rarely as agile as that chest-hugging bodice would suggest, kill, crush and maim with aplomb. The counter-argument to this is the fact that only a certain ilk of superstardom can actually fuel this late-era detour towards violent glory. Not every ageing, visibly burgeoning man can step into the shoes of an action star and, irrespective of the choreographic details, come away swinging. That magic sauce, that manufactured gullibility is precisely why only a certain type of Khan can become a _Pathaan_, or a Tiger. There is indeed, imperious method to this awkward madness. Perhaps the only thing that blots this late-career switch for many actors is the fact that much like Thalaiva, the return from larger-than-life roles feels longer once you’ve christened yourself as the whale. It’s hard to imagine an actor who has practically claimed the ocean as his, to then be studying for scraps, hunting for authenticity in something comparatively modest. It’s where Dunki, Khan’s next after Jawan has likely swept everything before it, will truly make for an interesting study. It’s an echo of what made a masterful film Swades, pale in the shadow of some of the cornier yet undeniably successful things Khan did, the last time he rode a wave this high. That said, there is something interesting brewing in the way audiences have practically accepted ageing men as action stars, more so as a way to assuage their own fears about ageing than simply accepting the genre’s predictive methods. A large portion of this country has rapidly aged together, and it possibly views the past through the juvenility of the superstar as perhaps the only thing that hasn’t. On the one end it sounds like a collective midlife crisis, that our ageing actors are mirroring through newfound relevance. On the other, it’s just good old cinema making the impossible, the dubiously silly, look sensational and fun. It’s an emerging pedagogy for a forgotten genre, and it might both take and give in equal measure.