career injection
Can Bruce Willis shake off his action-movie ennui?
At the climax of a torturous Magic FM interview for Red 2, Bruce Willis was asked if Red 3 would happen. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” he yawned, resigned, like a framed man slapped with a death sentence. There, in a nutshell, is Willis today: an actor wearing the look of a man barely on nodding terms with surprise or enthusiasm.
In Willis-speak, the weariness isn’t surprising: he megaphoned his boredom with action movies in 1999. “I don’t want to see myself anymore smiling on the screen after killing someone and then making a wisecrack,” he griped. But Willis has continued to cash the action-porridge pay cheque, pounding his career into the gravel as he goes.
The situation is made depressing by proof that he can be decent. Willis’s acceptance of Expendables 2 duty – before the Twitter-off with Stallone – aligned him with Arnie and Sly but his range bests theirs. In Die Hard, he birthed a fresh strain of action hero: a laconic, vulnerable everyman with a smirk from Indy, squint from Clint and vest of his own.
Not all his subsequent experiments worked ( Hudson Hawk, The Bonfire Of The Vanities) but his controlled charisma held the camera’s attention in Pulp Fiction and Twelve Monkeys. Later, after stiffs ( Mercury Rising) and rote rock-busters ( Armageddon), he disinterred that quality control with a show of soulful restraint in The Sixth Sense: keeping the film’s secrets hidden, he also ensured we cared as the twist dropped.
Lately, he seemed committed anew in Rian Johnson’s Looper and appealingly wounded as a lonesome cop in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom; the combover was his idea. But it wasn’t enough to cover evidence of thinning commitment elsewhere. As if ever-diminished action sequels weren’t enough, a direct-to-VOD trend kicked in, ranging from duds like Set Up to this year’s non-tempting Vice. Reviews aggregates on Rotten Tomatoes trace a hard decline: some stall below 10%.
Reasons for hope are emerging. Extraction looks rote from the title down but he’s doing Misery on Broadway, Barry Levinson’s Rock The Kasbah with Bill Murray, Woody Allen’s next film and M. Night Shyamalan’s tragiromantic Labor Of Love – not necessarily a reunion we’d bet on, given Shyamalan’s recent form, but one we’d like to see work. And if he squeezes in some direct-to-disc pay-days in between? We wouldn’t be a bit surprised, but Willis can do better. KH