The Legacy of Bruce Willis
The cinema icon has retired from acting due to health reasons.
When Bruce Willis did a string of video-on-demand (VOD) movies over the past several years, it was all too easy for the masses to dismiss the actor as a lazy, aging talent who was cashing in on making easy money. After all, no one less than his Expendables co-star Sylvester Stallone had called him “GREEDY AND LAZY” for demanding $1 million per day for working on The Expendables 3 (heaven forbid we diminish the integrity of the Expendables franchise). Willis’ VOD movies seemed to extract the maximum amount of payment for the minimum amount of work. While Nicolas Cage could also do a string of VOD pictures, we could also reasonably believe A) it was to get out of massive debt; and B) he never phoned in it. Whereas Cage somehow became more beloved for his VOD work (probably bolstered by his big acting choices and also squeezing in artful movies like Joe, Mandy, and Pig), Willis became a subject of widespread mockery.
This comfort with mocking Willis’ career choices was likely bolstered by the fact that Willis has always had an uneasy relationship with stardom, something that seems to both annoy him and bemuse him (on his IMDb, Willis has played a version of himself no fewer than eight times). He also had a relationship for being “difficult” as far back as Julie Salamon’s 1992 nonfiction book The Devil’s Candy (shameless plug: listen to TCM’s podcast series based on the book!), which depicts him as aloof and taciturn on the set of The Bonfire of the Vanities in comparison to his warm and friendly co-star Tom Hanks. That reputation never really left Willis and as recently as 2021, Kevin Smith was still telling stories about how it was a nightmare to direct Willis on the 2010 movie Cop Out.1
On Wednesday, Rumer Willis confirmed on her Instagram what I had heard previously rumored about her father, which is that he was suffering from aphasia, a disorder where words become mixed up in speech and hearing:
In this light, everything about Willis’ recent career choices shifts. Rumer does not get into how long her father has been suffering from aphasia, but there’s probably a cold, hard business decision behind the majority of his movies from 2014 to 2022, which is that it was likely difficult to remember his lines (in 2015, The Guardian reported that Willis was using an earpiece as a “safety net” for the Broadway production of Misery). It looks like Willis, unable to perhaps meet the demands of starring in a theatrical feature (his only theatrically released lead role was in Eli Roth’s 2018 remake of Death Wish), decided to make as much money as possible for the work he was capable of doing, but to an outsider perspective, he was “greedy and lazy.”
This isn’t to absolve Willis of how he’s behaved towards everyone in his life or to paint him as a saint. Rather, it’s more of an indictment of us, the audience. It’s incredibly easy to take shots at movie stars. They become rich and famous for doing make believe. They have a reputation for being shallow and self-centered. It’s easy to roll your eyes at someone like Sean Penn saying he’s going to smelt his Oscars if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t get to speak at the ceremony as if Zelenskyy didn’t have anything better to do with his time. But we also see stars, in an age of branding, as commodities. And for Willis, it seemed like he was a brand that had gone willfully stale.
If you want to get sanctimonious, you could argue that Willis should have retired once he felt he was starting to decline, but I think that’s woefully delusional. If you could command $1 million for a day’s work to be in some harmless B-movie schlock that no one will remember, wouldn’t you take it? Is Bruce Willis’ legacy really in jeopardy because he did so many VOD movies?2 I doubt it. There was a market willing to pay him essentially an exaggerated appearance fee, and he took it. That doesn’t mean you can’t mock those movies, but it’s been weird to pass such harsh judgment on Willis for a business decision. I don’t think anyone was seriously harmed or insulted by Willis deciding to play Eddie Pilosa in Precious Cargo.
We (and I include myself here) felt far too much comfort mocking Willis instead of trying to assume there might be another reason for his recently filmography beyond paychecks (and even if it was just paychecks, who cares! There are far worse ways to make money!) Again, I get how we got here: Willis never endeared himself to the masses like fellow action stars Arnold Schwarzenegger or Keanu Reeves, and his action career also seemed to overshadow everything else he did. You didn’t have to take him “seriously” because his biggest successes came from popcorn movies rather than doing some massive transformation in association with an acclaimed director to chase clout. And yet I would argue that Willis was consistently one of Hollywood’s most underrated actors.
Bruce Willis Is a Great Actor
I would argue that our current action star was shaped far more by Bruce Willis in Die Hard than the many action films of contemporaries like Schwarzenegger and Stallone. While Schwarzenegger and Stallone led with their physiques coupled with some surprising charisma, Willis was charisma before physique. John McClane is a normal guy forced into extraordinary circumstances. He’s physically fit, but he never dominates the screen. Instead, Willis always had to come at you as an actor to win you over. He had to have expert comic timing, be a taciturn tough guy, and still show vulnerability.
As many know, Willis’ first breakthrough was on Moonlighting, a show that demonstrated his comic chops, which made him seem like a bizarre choice to lead an action movie like Die Hard. But that comic charm continued to serve Willis well over the course of his career, especially when you see that Willis rarely used comedy as a form of self-deprecation (more often than not, Willis would play characters who were irked at their circumstances rather than poking fun at themselves). While Willis was rarely able to divorce his comedy from action roles (even in something as broad as The Whole Nine Yards, he’s a hitman in hiding), he knew how to find the laugh. And yet I would also argue that when Willis did completely leave his action persona behind, he had one of his funniest roles in Death Becomes Her.
Where Willis has never received enough credit is in his dramatic work. Because he was most bankable as an action-comedy hero, and because he would never do the whole “I’m disappearing into a role so I can be molded by a great director and pave my way to Oscar night” thing, it was incredibly easy for audiences to ignore or overlook every time he gave a magnificent, textured performance. It’s easy to forget that Bruce Willis is in Pulp Fiction when that movie has Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, and Uma Thurman giving Oscar-nomianted performances. It’s easy to forget about 12 Monkeys when you’ve got Terry Gilliam’s brilliant design and one of Brad Pitt’s best performances. How can you think about Willis’ character in The Sixth Sense when he’s overshadowed by both Haley Joel Osment and the film’s massive twist ending? Where does Willis fit into Unbreakable, a film that was far too ahead of its time to land properly? Willis is fantastic in Moonrise Kingdom, but isn’t the whole cast fantastic? Who but the most devoted cinephile would remind you of films like Hostage or Alpha Dog?
If you look at the arc of Willis’ filmography, it’s fitting to see Looper as its conclusion. Looper comes just before the wave of VOD titles, and as a story, it’s a poignant one in the context of Willis’ career. For those that don’t know, Looper is a sci-fi action film about a world where time travel exists and targets are sent back to the past to be murdered. It’s a relatively clean method of disposal since there’s no body in the future and no record in the past. However, hitmen (called Loopers) have their own contracts and when those contracts expire in 30 years, they themselves will be sent back to be killed by their younger selves, thus “closing the loop.” Willis is the older version of Joe, and when Old Joe escapes, it sends his younger version (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) on the hunt before the crime syndicate that employs him can carry out a gruesome punishment.
I don’t know how Rian Johnson would make the film today, but the solution would seemingly be to either use VFX to create a digitally de-aged Willis (a la Gemini Man) or see if a younger actor could play both roles with the help of makeup. The brilliance of using two different actors here is that it allows Willis to come face-to-face not to himself, but to an idea of himself. Part of the reason Gordon-Levitt’s performance works so well is that Willis had existed in the public consciousness as a movie star for about a quarter of a century. And within that framework, you have Willis as a character who feels bound to the choices he made and a younger version of himself choosing to go in a different direction. For Willis, it’s a performance that’s far more reflective and thoughtful than any of the times he’s parodied himself.
I seriously doubt Looper was ever intended as a swan song for Willis’ career, but in retrospect, it now functions as one. It serves as another action film in his filmography, but one that’s far more textured than other genre pictures. It gives him the chance to play a man laden with regret and anger, and yet still compelled to carry on and find a way to survive. And he’s cast against a younger actor who, through makeup and mannerisms, is literally in the mold of Willis, but is set on going in a new direction (again, one of the clever things about the movie is no one would ever think of Gordon-Levitt as “The Next Bruce Willis”). While Willis still had a few sequels in him after Looper (A Good Day to Die Hard, RED 2, G.I. Joe: Retaliation), Johnson’s movie stands as both an ode and terminus for Willis because while it’s a sci-fi action movie, it’s also a thoughtful drama. It makes use of Willis many gifts without ever poking fun at his persona. The film takes Bruce Willis seriously, and with the news of his retirement, I’m reminded that we should have been doing the same.
Notes on the 2022 Oscars
I’m not going to write about The Slap. If you want to read about that, I recommend these perspectives from Wesley Morris, Roxane Gay, and Soraya Nadia McDonald.
Instead, I’d like to comment on the show as a whole. I think the show managed to reinforce why the Oscars as an award matter. When you watch the acceptance speeches from Ariana DeBose and Troy Kotsur, you can see how much these wins mean to them, but also in terms of representation. An Afro-Latina, queer woman and a deaf man won the highest award in their field, and that’s inspiring. When you see how The Slap trampled over the rest of the night, it’s hard not to feel incensed that Questlove and other winners had their moment overshadowed because violence had sucked all the air out of the room.
And yet I also feel like that was the worst Oscars ceremony I’d ever seen in my life, and that was before The Slap became the only thing anyone would talk about. I’m not going to cast blame on any individual because I don’t know why the show was shaped or designed in this particular fashion. I don’t know if it was the Academy or ABC or producer Will Packer or a confluence of many voices. Whomever was responsible, the show was a disaster because despite some moments that worked (good jokes, acceptance speeches), you had a show that ultimately seemed embarrassed by movies.
If you remove a love of movies, then you just have a wealthy people giving each other trophies. That’s all it is. It’s so weird to me that the show would take a potshot at a film like The Last Duel. Why? Because it flopped at the box office? I don’t know, a film about toxic masculinity using female protection as an excuse for violence may have been worth watching! Who was under the impression that Twitter polls wouldn’t be gamed by the most virulent fanbases? Why have extreme sports guys introduce an homage to Bond instead of the living Bond actors? Why do a tribute to The Godfather but not have Robert De Niro or Al Pacino speak? There were so many baffling decisions, but they all seemed rooted in an insecurity about movies themselves as if they no longer deserved their place in our culture.
Of course, the most egregious move was cutting eight categories, which solved nothing. The show ran even longer than last year’s awards (a ceremony where winners were encouraged to have longer speeches), and it truncated the importance of editing, production design, and other crafts not to mention the value of seeing Riz Ahmed become the first Muslim man to win an Oscar for Best Live-Action Short Film. Anyone who thinks that wouldn’t make for good television (and don’t even get me started on not showing the Governor’s Awards) probably shouldn’t be in the television business.
I don’t know where the Oscars go from here. I imagine they’ll try to coast on the controversy of The Slap for next year, which is a horrible mistake because you can’t create unexpected moments beyond the acceptance speeches. The best suggestion I’ve heard (and the Academy/ABC will never go for it, but it’s great) is that the show should be longer. Technical categories should go first for the die-hard fans and then you can put the bigger categories together for everyone else. You should also add categories for Best Casting and Best Stunts. But as long as the Oscars continue to run from a love of movies, they’ll need to keep relying on outrageous moments to stay remotely relevant.
Capsule Reviews
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Man, did I love this movie. Yes, Daniels (the name that co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert go by when making movies together) make weird movies, but they’re not weird simply for the sake of weirdness. If anything, I think their movies (their other being Swiss Army Man) show weirdness as life in the face of nihilism and chaos. Their unbridled creativity is a breath of fresh air, and I found Everything Everywhere All at Once to be deeply moving and painfully funny with incredible performances across the board, although I was particularly moved by Ke Huy Quan’s work. Some may not have the patience for what Daniels are doing with the movie, but I was completely on board, and I really hope we don’t have to wait another six years for their next feature.
The Lost City
This is exactly the movie I wanted it to be. Rather than taking shots at the romance genre, The Lost City celebrates it while having some gentle fun with its tropes. Sandra Bullock is terrific, but I continue to be amazed at what a Channing Tatum fan I’ve become. In the 2000s, I did not care for him at all, but in 2012 it’s like a switch flipped and now he’s one of my favorite actors working today. I also love that Daniel Radcliffe plays the villain. His post-Potter career continues to fascinate me, and as a friend pointed out recently, he’s basically taken the financial security the Potter franchise provided and used it to make whatever he wants.
For more on what I’ve been watching, follow me on Letterboxd.
It should be noted that not every director had this experience. Rian Johnson was glowing about his experience working with Willis on Looper. “No, he was incredibly easy and awesome, and I realized that from the first moment he showed up on set,” Johnson told Vulture. “In a cast full of easy actors, he was maybe the easiest actually.” For his part, Willis also said in 2012 that he thought Looper was better than anything he had ever done.
This is all assuming that Willis made the choice to be in these movies. There’s evidence that people took advantage of his mental state to use him as a cash cow. Either way, I don’t see how Willis is the villain in the story of him doing lousy VOD films.