The verdict is in: America is not buying the new young action stars Hollywood has to offer. If, as J. Hoberman astutely observed last fall in this magazine, there's a dearth of legitimate up-and-coming male actors to take the reigns from — or at least to co-exist alongside — established stars like Tom Cruise, Will Smith, and Denzel Washington, this summer has proven that such a shortage of leading men is all the more pronounced when it comes to action movies, where manliness is equated with godliness.

Exhibit A in this distressing trend is White House Down, which was poised to solidify the tough-guy credentials of Channing Tatum. Fresh off critical (Magic Mike) and popular (21 Jump Street) successes, and working with summer blockbuster specialist Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) in a Die Hard clone alongside Jaime Foxx, Tatum had everything lined up in his favor... until, that is, the film opened to a disastrous $26 million July 4 weekend box office take, and potentially detonated his A-list action qualifications.

He's not, however, the only one. Just look at Armie Hammer, whose The Lone Ranger stands to be the summer's biggest financial disaster despite coming from the illustrious team (star Johnny Depp, director Gore Verbinski, producer Jerry Bruckheimer) behind the billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Or how about Henry Cavill, our latest and supposedly greatest Superman, whose Man of Steel opened enormously ($116 million in its first three days), and then — with a 65 percent domestic drop in its second weekend — plummeted faster than a, well, you know.

To be fair, those films' performance issues can be chalked up to variety of factors, some not the fault of their leads. But they're also clear signs of a consensus that the latest generation of macho heroes aren't nearly macho enough. Even a cursory glance around the summer-action landscape reveals a scarcity of new action stars capable of launching — or sustaining — a high-octane tentpole release. The most promising candidate would be Vin Diesel, but while he may be able to up receipts with the Fast and Furious series, that's only with considerable help from an increasingly overstuffed ensemble (including flailing-franchise savior Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson). Otherwise, Diesel hasn't headlined a hit in forever (September's Riddick will again determine if he can exist outside his favored hot rod milieu). And don't look to the last few years, when things haven't been any rosier, with Garrett Hedlund underwhelming in Tron: Legacy and Taylor Kitsch flailing with Battleship and outright bombing with John Carter.

Today, Robert Downey Jr. stands atop the action-cinema hill courtesy of Iron Man. And he's 48 years old. That fact would be more stunning if it weren't part and parcel of an era in which Bruce Willis still makes Die Hards and continues to lead a pack of "mature" killers in Red 2, in which Sylvester Stallone keeps recruiting old-school aggro-icons for The Expendables, and in which Arnold Schwarzenegger keeps chugging along — soon to team up with Sly in October's Escape Plan — even after taking off the better part of a decade to run California. These elder-statesmen efforts aren't, of course, as lucrative as their famous leads' career-defining hits. But the fact that they even exist as viable (if not outright well-received) projects speaks volumes about the sorry state of badass cinema circa 2013.

What those well-known stars have that newbies don't is a track record, sure, but more than that, they have distinctive charisma. Unique personas. Idiosyncratic attitude. In short: They're inimitable larger-than-life personalities, not preprogrammed, focus-tested-to-death hunks. The current crop of young male action actors is cut from the same fashion-mag handsome mold — good luck finding the average moviegoer who knows the difference between Hedlund and Charlie Hunnam. They're a tad too bland, too pretty, too ordinary to resonate.

It's not that all of these contenders for the action throne are bad actors. Tatum, for one, has shown surprising deftness in both dramas and comedies. It's just that, as a He-Man, he still comes across as too youthful and insubstantial to convincingly be performing the feats of derring-do found in White House Down. That's also true of Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn's brutal Only God Forgives (out this weekend), which finds the actor hopelessly out of his element as an underground fighting-syndicate thug in sleazy Thailand. With age comes not only wisdom but also, crucially, presence, heft, and a sense of intimidation — things that can't be compensated for by any amount of posturing.

As Hoberman points out, Shia LaBeouf is something of an exception to this rule, in that he led the robot charge in the amazingly profitable Transformers series, just as Sam Worthington spearheaded alien war in Avatar, and Sons of Anarchy's Charlie Hunnam now commands mecha battalions in Pacific Rim, and Chris Hemsworth has taken on the Thor mantle. Those films' success or failure, however, occurs virtually irrespective of their human element; they're CG spectacles founded on fantastical creatures and elaborate effects. What Hollywood is missing is a fresh-faced male star who can prop up a rock-'em-sock-'em extravaganza on his own, rather than just as a token organic puppet amid computer-generated mayhem. Until that figure arrives, action movie fans will just have to be content with more slam-bang sagas from yesteryear's ass-kickers.

Nick Schager Nick Schager is a NYC-area film critic and culture writer with twenty years of professional experience writing about all the movies you love, and countless others that you don’t.

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