10 Oddly Specific Genres That Were Briefly Hugely Popular

While there might not be many similarities between the two movies on the surface, both Taken and Gran Torino arrived at opposite ends of 2008 and suddenly led to the rise of what would soon become known as the geri-action genre, and in virtually no time at all theaters became flooded with revenge-driven thrillers powered by some of Hollywood's elder statesmen.

Neeson turned this into a hugely successful late-career reinvention that turned him into one of cinema's biggest action stars as he entered his 60s, and it appeared as though many of his contemporaries wanted to live out their mid-to-later life crises armed to the teeth and mowing down faceless goons in the name of our entertainment.

Keanu Reeves fared the best by far when John Wick arrived a month after he turned 50, The Expendables built an entire franchise around the idea with Stallone also bringing back Rambo twice for good measure, fellow icon Arnold Schwarzenegger used old age to his advantage in his 2013 comeback vehicle The Last Stand and even the kindly Michael Caine showed himself as a man not to be f*cked with in Harry Brown.

Kevin Costner's 3 Days to Kill and Sean Penn's The Gunman didn't fare quite as well, but the short-lived RED series still gave us Helen Mirren dressed to the nines and wreaking havoc with a minigun, for which we will forever be grateful.