LOS ANGELES — If ever a film, cinematically speaking, had nothing to lose, it would be “The Expendables.”

Its genre, hard action, peaked in the 1980s. And the dozen or so bruisers in its ensemble cast are even older, on average, than the women in “Sex and the City 2.”

“You’re pretty well limited as to how gullible people are,” said the film’s director and star, Sylvester Stallone.

Mr. Stallone, who is 63, was referring to what he called “the age factor,” and his own return to an action role, this time as Barney Ross, a mercenary who shoots to kill but will do it by hand if he must.

Yet “The Expendables,” a relatively high-budget production from the usually low-budget operators Nu Image and Millennium Films, is beginning to look like a potential late-summer winner for Lionsgate, which is to release it on Aug. 13, after a big promotional push at the Comic-Con International fan convention in late July.

An early press screening at Lionsgate’s Santa Monica headquarters last week drew a full house and whoops in all the right places as Mr. Stallone led his hired guns on a mission to a drug-infested island.

Stuff explodes. Men die. Cigars are smoked in (short) contemplative moments in a movie whose script is credited to David Callaham and Mr. Stallone, but that owes much to precedents like “The Professionals,” “The Wild Bunch” and “The Dirty Dozen.”

The cast matches older stars, like Mr. Stallone, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts and, in a dual cameo, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger — all over 50 — with some slightly younger ones.

Those include the martial arts expert Jet Li, along with the fight- and wrestling-circuit champions Randy Couture and Steve Austin, and a National Football League veteran, Terry Crews, all in their 40s. At 37, the British tough-guy Jason Statham, whose credits include “Crank” and “Revolver,” is the baby.

In a complicated bit of deal-making, “The Expendables” was wrangled from Warner Brothers, where the film, then called “Barrow,” was born about six years ago in a pitch by Mr. Callaham, who was working with the producers Basil Iwanyk of Thunder Road Pictures and Guymon Casady of Management 360.

The idea was to make an old-fashioned action movie about soldiers of fortune, “back when ‘mercenary’ wasn’t such a dirty word” because of private contractors’ dealings in Iraq, Mr. Iwanyk said.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, Warner was something of an action factory, churning out dozens of heavily armed hits like the “Lethal Weapon” series, along with the Stallone vehicles “Assassins,” “The Specialist” and “Demolition Man.”

As the studio turned toward fantasies like “Harry Potter” and rebooted superheroes like Batman in “The Dark Knight,” however, it lost interest in simple grit, and let “The Expendables” go to Nu Image and Millennium with Mr. Stallone, whose idea from the beginning was to make a throwback.

“I would sure like to bring the genre back a little bit, so some young guys could pick up the banner,” Mr. Stallone said in a telephone interview last week.

Asked what had killed classic action films like his “Rambo” and “Rocky” series —which each eked out a respectable performance with retro-style sequels in the past few years — Mr. Stallone answered in a word: “technology.”

When stars could “Velcro their muscles on, it was over,” he said.

A lithe but loopy Tobey Maguire could play a perfectly credible Spider-Man, as computer-generated effects made up for the raw athleticism that Mr. Stallone, Mr. Schwarzenegger and others brought to their trademark roles. Meanwhile, attitudes changed, as Matt Damon, the self-doubting, Mini-Cooper-driving hero of the “Bourne” films, set the standard for a new and less violent kind of hero.

Until, perhaps, “The Expendables.”

The film was rated R last week “for strong action and bloody violence throughout.” That is no surprise to Mr. Stallone, who used a stunt crew of about 75 and a budget of about $80 million to shoot the movie in Louisiana and Brazil. It is about the kind of men who drop in on the bad guys from a plane with hidden machine guns in the front and a “Global Wildlife Conservancy” logo on the side.

Computer-generated imagery was used sparingly, for instance when an elaborate government building had to be toppled. “You won’t believe this, but Brazil would not let us destroy their palace,” Mr. Stallone said.

But the pyrotechnics were real, he said, as were bits of debris that fell within two or three yards of the director’s station.

Rounding up the cast, Mr. Stallone said, was not especially difficult, except for Jean-Claude Van Damme, who declined a role that was eventually taken by Mr. Lundgren. “He told me, you should be trying to save people in South Central,” Mr. Stallone recalled of a conversation with Mr. Van Damme.

“I knew I’d lost him.”

Whether Mr. Schwarzenegger’s brief appearance, in which he swaps lines with both Mr. Stallone and Mr. Willis, portends a return to the screen when his term as California governor ends in January is anyone’s guess. “He gets asked every couple of weeks” about his plans, said Aaron McLear, a spokesman for Mr. Schwarzenegger.

Mr. Stallone said he would like next to play the mobster John Gotti in a father-and-son story, and has been spending time with John Gotti Jr., trying to get a film started.

As for younger stars, Mr. Stallone sees more sweaty action ahead, as they tire of posing in front of a green screen to create digital effects.

“Taylor Lautner, all of these guys want to step up,” he said.

“Given the opportunity to return to Vietnam, down and dirty, they’d be way up for it.”