Since the mid-2000s, there has been a marked proliferation of veteran heroes in the action genre, exemplified by the success of franchises like The Expendables (2010, 2012, 2014, with a fourth in development) and Taken (2008, 2012, 2014), producing a growing collection of films to which Vanity Fair magazine was moved to apply the moniker ‘Dadcore’ (Taylor 2014). This chapter will examine the factors that have contributed to this proliferation, but also the ways in which contemporary ageing action stars’ bodies produce meaning in relation to their immediate narrative contexts, and to wider cultural narratives of ageing. The now well-established methodological emphasis on paying close attention to the details of performance (see, for example, Affron 1977, King 1991 [1985], Naremore 1988 and Klevan 2005) has historically tended to neglect the stars of action cinema. In the few studies of ageing male action stars that exist, the physical appearance of figures such as Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone is analysed to highly productive ends, but the texture of their ageing star bodies’ performance-in- motion is generalised rather than parsed in detail. This may be because physical stature and the static postures of mastery that express it are such an important component of the male action hero's construction and the paratextual marketing of his action body that there is less perceived imperative to consider movement closely; or perhaps the force of normative presumptions of ageing as an inevitable slowing or stiffening of movement unwittingly situates movement as a lesser object of study (and I will return to questions of stature, slowing and stiffening in due course). Either way, there remains a need to extend existing scholarship in this area by analysing the ageing action star body not just as ‘a sign of meaning’ but as ‘a body in action’, as Paul McDonald puts it (1998: 182). This chapter will therefore use close analysis of physical performance to understand the epistemic and phenomenological consequences of real-world ageing – visible or simply known – on the construction of the ageing action star in recent action cinema.