In his finest roles, Bruce Willis chips meticulously away at his charisma until he reaches something rough-edged and elemental underneath.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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