Bruce Willis has appeared in twenty-two feature films since 2018, and the vast majority are disposable by design. Cheaply produced, straight to streaming, and featuring performers who are mostly well below Willis’s star calibre—or pay grade—they bear titles that suggest a game of action-flick Mad Libs, or maybe an accidental wingnut haiku: “American Siege,” “Cosmic Sin,” “Survive the Night,” “Deadlock,” “Fortress,” “Breach.” Until recently, many Willis fans took a cynical, hard-bitten view of this prodigious output. Like his spiritual predecessor Charles Bronson, Willis, who is sixty-seven, had presumably made a conscious decision to simply switch his quality-control filter to the Off position in his golden years, raking in cash that he couldn’t possibly need. He was an icon cruising on autopilot, and, after watching him save the world several times over, who could blame him? As John McClane, the human one-liner dispenser that Willis played in the “Die Hard” franchise, might have told skeptics, “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!” Then, last week, Willis’s family announced that he is suffering from aphasia, a cognitive disorder affecting the ability to produce and understand speech, and that he was “stepping away” from acting as a result. A subsequent report in the Los Angeles Times revealed that Willis’s decline had been apparent on set for years, and that his handlers had been maintaining his productivity by drastically cutting down his parts and even feeding him lines through an earpiece.
The news suddenly recontextualized Willis’s churn of disposable action movies, as well as the strangely blank affect that has defined his late-career screen presence. Reviewing “Hard Kill,” a 2020 movie starring Willis as a tech C.E.O. whose daughter gets kidnapped, a critic for the Guardian described him as occupying “that grey area between zero fuss and not much effort.” This and other similarly disparaging assessments now exist in their own gray area, where public opinion of an actor’s craft meets public knowledge of his extenuating circumstances. Last Thursday, in an uncharacteristically tasteful gesture, the organizers of the Golden Raspberry Awards, which highlight the worst movie performances of the year, rescinded their prize for Willis’s 2021 film “Cosmic Sin,” saying, in a statement, that if an actor’s performance is affected by a medical condition it is “not appropriate to give them a Razzie.” But the truth is that Willis has been accused of embodying the wrong kind of “effortlessness” since long before his medical disclosures, because, like Toshiro Mifune and Clint Eastwood—both of whom he was aptly compared to, in a 1996 article in Rolling Stone—his stardom has been predicated almost since the beginning on a strategic minimalism. The bald, bullet-headed look that he cultivated over time gave the impression of an actor carved from granite, a sleek solidity fissured only by one of Hollywood’s great hairline smirks. In his best roles, Willis chips meticulously away at his charisma until he reaches something rough-edged and elemental underneath.
It’s easy to forget that Willis began his career as a smoldering neo-screwball type, like a blue-collar Elliott Gould, or Mickey Rourke by way of “Saturday Night Live.” Playing a rumpled but suave private detective on ABC’s network meta-comedy “Moonlighting,” which aired from 1985 to 1989, Willis rapped his knuckles against the fourth wall and parried Cybill Shepherd’s banter so nimbly that both seemed swept off their feet. His unlikely crossover into big-screen stardom rested on the irony of watching a slouchy, sitcom-style charmer stranded suddenly in the wrong genre. The first “Die Hard” film, as superbly engineered by the director John McTiernan, exults in its own bruising incongruity, with Willis’s character gamely straddling the line between competence and confusion. Scuttling barefoot over broken glass or dangling from a hose by his less-than-Schwarzeneggerian biceps, Willis doesn’t so much star in “Die Hard” as endure it in a fugue state of exertion punctuated by heavy sighs and snarky asides. In an era famed for its implacable, hard-bodied action heroes, Willis was more like a sarcastic punching bag—an endearing new action-movie archetype that he spent the next two decades repeating, revising, or satirizing as needed.
An inevitable string of other action roles followed, in the early nineties, while, at the same time, Willis attempted to leaven his output with appearances in satirical comedies (strained in “The Bonfire of the Vanities”; inspired in “Death Becomes Her”). He took a few genuine risks, in debacles such as the jazzy cat-burglar comedy “Hudson Hawk” and the sexually explicit thriller “Color of Night,” and jabbed at his own increasing predictability in Robert Altman’s Hollywood sendup “The Player,” depicting a version of himself who’s brought in to adorn a blockbuster production opposite Julia Roberts. But, for a leading man trying to transcend his own typecasting, his first great counterpunch came with a supporting role in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” as an aging palooka named Butch, whose refusal to throw a fight for money is presented as the dim stirring of some long-suppressed principle. As in “Die Hard,” Willis is an everyman who finds himself under siege and is forced to fight back, but this time the transformation is played for wry, metatextual humor. At a climactic moment, surveying a literal murderers’ row of potential weapons, he opts for a samurai sword with a winning mix of bloodlust and bewilderment, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s about to do.
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This air of wry perplexity turned out to be a defining Willis trait, and was central to his remarkable run of performances in the mid-to-late nineties. In Terry Gilliam’s dystopian thriller “12 Monkeys,” a spiritual remake of Chris Marker’s indelible “La Jetée,” he plays a post-apocalyptic time traveller driven by a foggy memory of violence. The 1996 making-of documentary, “The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys,” shows a terse, contrarian Willis fighting—and ultimately losing—a battle with Gilliam over their differing interpretations of the material. But the end result is an aptly hollowed-out performance. As James Cole, one of the few survivors of a virus that wipes out most of the world, Willis eliminates all traces of his residual action-hero charisma. Stumbling on buckling knees through the film’s surrealist clutter, he seems like he could be in a trance, or suffering existential shell shock. He’s like a ghost haunting himself, and by the end of the circular, tail-swallowing narrative his strange performance accrues a blindsiding poignance.
The most ingenious exploitation of Willis’s deceptive vulnerability, though, can be found in M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” and the director’s next film, “Unbreakable.” In “The Sixth Sense,” Willis, playing a child psychologist named Malcolm Crowe, is introduced in a familiar alpha-movie-star scenario—surprised at home by a gun-wielding intruder—but, instead of dispatching the assailant, his character takes a bullet to the gut. Shyamalan, a millennial Rod Serling in love with corkscrew endings, relies on Willis’s established aura of invincibility to cleverly protect the film’s big twist: that Crowe has actually been dead since the film’s opening confrontation. Willis’s slightly off-kilter body language and deliberate line readings give the protagonist a stilted quality that, on repeat viewings, seems entirely apt for a man who is repressing his own purgatorial loneliness. In “Unbreakable,” Willis gives an even better performance, playing David Dunn, a former football player who’s like an absurdist riff on John McClane: instead of being inexplicably invulnerable, he is an honest-to-God genetic anomaly, gifted with superheroic powers. Again, Shyamalan’s magisterial pulp style unlocks Willis’s best instincts. Unaware—and then anxiously wary—of his comic-book potency, Dunn has the soft, halting voice of a man who doesn’t want to acknowledge his own strength. The scene in which he finally embraces his calling as a vigilante eschews dialogue entirely in favor of body language: locked in a life-or-death struggle with a bulky, sociopathic home invader, David clings desperately to his opponent while being smashed into the drywall over and over again. The sequence derives much of its masochistic poetry from Willis’s beguiling, paradoxical portrayal of strength as indivisible from fragility.
With several notable exceptions, including Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Twelve”—which paid tribute to “The Player” by having Willis once again portray himself in glad-handing celebrity mode—Willis didn’t work with very many auteur directors, and this may account in part for the journeyman quality of his post-millennial output. Kevin Smith cast him in the misbegotten procedural spoof “Cop Out” (2010), then vented publicly about how “fucking soul-crushing” he found the experience. (Last week, Smith apologized.) The bad press and worse vibes surrounding that film marked a turning point, after which Willis largely stopped appearing in interesting new roles and instead started doing victory laps. There was a bit of Hollywood-elder resonance to his work in Rian Johnson’s “Looper,” which featured Willis, in an embedded nod to “12 Monkeys,” playing an assassin facing down his younger self. A similar reckoning with obsolescence informs the later “Die Hard” sequels and the inferior “Unbreakable” continuation “Glass,” in which David Dunn meets a spectacularly ignominious fate.
In “The Expendables 2” (2012), Willis shares a scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger in which they swap catchphrases. It’s a ridiculous film, but, knowing what we now know, there’s a glimmer of pathos in watching Willis promise, “I’ll be back.” Some of us had maintained hope that a great valedictory role would eventually present itself to an actor who so deserved one. It’s clear now that more than a preference for easy paychecks was standing in Willis’s way. But it’s worth celebrating an actor who kept a grip on his understated gifts for as long as Willis did, even when he reached beyond them.
