Age, Talent and Good Movies

I'm sitting here watching The Terminator - not T2:Judgment Day or T3:Rise of the Machines - but the 1984 sci-fi classic starring Arnold Schwarzenegger before he got small. While watching it I started thinking about the Governator's acting career path. He started out in a series of horrible B movies (anyone remember Hercules in New York?) and then made a series of action movies that while far from Oscar worthy have become classics of the genre. The Conan movies, Predator, The Running Man, and Commando being the best. Then Arnold apparently decided that he knew how to act. He sandwiched Total Recall, which wasn't bad, between Twins and Kindergarten Cop. These two movies were supposed to move Arnold beyond the hulking brute phase of his career and they corresponded with a noticeable decline in his muscle mass. He followed those movies with his last good movie the aforementioned T2. The second Terminator movie is probably Arnold's best movie and it's one of his better performances. From that point on however, while he focused on acting and became a better performer, the movies he's been in have gotten consistently worse.

I can't think of any other actor whose career path has been one of increasing individual ability combined with a decline in the actual quality of his or her movies. Some, like Martin Sheen, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, haven't made movies that equal some of their early films, but they were lucky enough to star in some of the greatest movies ever as young actors. Harrison Ford might come closest, but I'm not entirely convinced that he's much better than he was when he was young.

Maybe it's Schwarzenegger's choice of genre that make him especially vulnerable to this problem. An obvious example would be Sylvester Stallone whose earlyish movies Rockey and First Blood were two of his best, but he seems to actually be getting worse as an actor and is more and more playing a parody of his former self.

Of course not everyone can be a John Wayne and keep making better movies and alternating between good and bad movies until the end of his career, but it's a more common career path than the one Arnold's taken.