If you are in your 50s, 40s or even late 30s and feel as though things are rapidly heading south, might I point you in the direction of Apex, the 95-minute action movie that launched last week on Netflix and is currently parked at No 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. You may think Apex, which has almost no dialogue, a paper-thin script and plot holes the size of the Australian outback in which it was filmed, is not for you, but you would be wrong. Next time you make a noise when you get up from the sofa, you can visualise Charlize Theron free-climbing a cliff face in peak middle age and remind yourself these things are still possible.

What’s startling about this is that Theron, at 50, appears to have successfully outrun the Hollywood dead end that greets women on their 34th birthday. She could be unrecognisable from surgery while clinging to the reboot of some earlier role. She could be trapped in Yorgos Lanthimos-style whimsy, because what could be more whimsical and grotesque than an ageing female actor? She could be playing someone’s mother – specifically, the mother of a male actor some five years her junior. Instead, Theron has been everywhere in the past fortnight, dominating the social-media feeds, crowding out the increasingly desperate-looking publicity push from the cast of The Devil Wears Prada 2, and shinning up a wall in Times Square in New York to promote a film that is basically an instructional climbing video with a serial killer subplot.

I mean, it works for me. And, while it probably doesn’t need saying that Apex isn’t Citizen Kane, it is a thoroughly enjoyable hour and a half (the length that, by law, all films should be) and an antidote to the current news cycle. Theron plays Sasha, a serious climber who, after a tragic accident on a mountain in Norway, goes on a solo camping trip to Australia where she enjoys the typical backpacker experience: being chased through the bush by a psychotic killer (Taron Egerton) brandishing a crossbow, from whom she must escape by whitewater rafting and climbing a cliff without ropes. It’s all a long way from the Italian Job remake.

Theron, of course, has form in this area, going back to recent roles in action movies such as The Old Guard and Atomic Blonde, and there are earlier precedents for this kind of midlife turn of the wheel – although I would argue few female actors have landed them so successfully. Linda Hamilton was 35 in 1991 when she pulled off those chin-ups in the opening scene of Terminator 2. A few years later, Meryl Streep was in her mid-40s when, pursued by Kevin Bacon, she ploughed down the rapids in The River Wild, and of course she did some of the stunts herself.

In 2021, Angelina Jolie had another crack at action-hero status in Marvel’s Eternals, and Kate Beckinsale has gone through that Liam Neeson period, during which she seemed always to be flying perpendicular on the sides of buses. With the exception of Hamilton, none of these roles worked in my view because the actors appeared too delicate and poised, too nervous of upsetting red carpet standards, which is to say too glaringly incapable of, say, genuinely kicking down a door or digging a hole in the road. (Looking at those posters of Beckinsale always made me feel tired and wonder if she had ever considered sitting down for a moment for a cup of tea.)

Theron is a different beast altogether and has been ever since Mad Max: Fury Road, the 2015 movie in which she appeared shaven-headed and built like an outhouse, an appearance of toughness that just doesn’t work if you’re an actor who has taken too many GLP-1s. While promoting Apex, Theron has been at pains to point out that she had a stunt double for the kayaking scenes, but she did most of the climbing herself, and it’s a whole look, one she doubled down on at the Apex premiere in New York last week by wearing what a friend points out was a men’s suit by Dior. For those of us who are into that sort of thing, it was certainly noted and appreciated.

Of course, Theron has certain genetic advantages when it comes to being an action hero, not least what she once memorably described as her “big Dutch face” and the ability to build muscle. And, while the fact she is only four months older than me is, on one level, a bitter pill to swallow given how out of breath I am after two flights of stairs, on the other hand it gives me hope: if I can get to the gym more than twice every three weeks, who knows what may still be possible?

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist