The first time I interviewed Bruce Willis was in late 1995, as he hit the publicity tours and junkets to promote 12 Monkeys. Off the top of my head, I can also remember interviewing him for Last Man Standing, Fifth Element, Unbreakable, Over the Hedge, and one other whose title I can’t recall right now, but I think his daughter had an appearance in it.
Willis is notoriously prickly in this environment – he doesn’t like the promotional grind. He sometimes cooperates, but just as often seems intentionally low energy and uninterested.
He also doesn’t like people like me; entertainment journalists who, to be fair, include a high percentage of sycophants, idiots and bottom tier talent among the group. But not all of us.
Here’s why I mentioned all of the above:
I like Bruce Willis very much, going all the way back to Moonlighting, which we watched faithfully every week to take in his charismatic swagger, impish grin, and tasteful selection of songs he’d sing a bit of while dropping Bon Mots behind him. He’s given me some of those trademark smirks, which looked great on camera, but just as often had his head down, barely engaged.
That said, in the past two years, I have reviewed a number of films in which Willis’s name and face on the poster promised more than the viewer got. Films in which he appeared for just a few scenes, leaving the majority of screen time for less well-known actors whose names wouldn’t sell as many tickets (or online rentals, to be more accurate).
In just the past couple of years, he has made more than 20 direct-to-video flicks. I have sadly given reviews to these B-movies that disappeared into the wind, but not without Willis’s name being attached to these bombs. Examples:
The latest, just released a few days ago is Wire Room, a lame, low budget crime thriller that looks like a student film, directed by the modern day Roger Corman, the schlock-churning Director Matt Eskandari. Kevin Dillon, a good actor, is the lead. Willis appears in the first 11 minutes. There’s a whole scene where almost all of his lines are in cutaways – never more than a few words at a time. Not lines—words. He pops up again for a brief shot here and there, and then shows up at the end to walk away with the other two actors who filled the vast majority of the 90 minutes.
Is Willis damaging his legacy with these numerous flops?
This is where things get a bit sensitive. As we now know, the poor man is suffering from aphasia – a degenerative brain disease that causes problems with speech and words. Many patients can only speak a few words at a time. In other words, it seems I(I can’t say for sure) that Willis’s latest film bearing his name, was shot and clumsily edited so that his 67 year-old face is only shown in small, static bits, before cutting away to other actors. It honestly made me sad. His family has said that he is stepping away from acting, so the remaining films, we can assume, were shot a while back and are awaiting their release date.
If someone offered you a gob of cash for a day or two of work and your name on the poster, would you turn it down? I wouldn’t, but I’m not a zillionaire with a filmography that spans decades and includes beloved films.
Bruce has a lot of mouths to feed and maybe he somehow needs the money? He also likes to work on film sets, so maybe he was just staving off the inevitable end of the line. Only a finite group of insiders and family know for sure.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. After all, relatively few folks will see these movies. But I am bummed out by the sad end to his amazing career. I wish it wasn’t making a soft, obscure landing with films like Wire Room. If I could destroy the prints showing him borderline feeble and not himself, I surely would.
Until then, I’ll let you know about the remaining films when they come out.
If they even let me see them after this.
So long, Bruce. You were a great actor and people should go back and watch your work in films like Nobody’s Fool with Paul Newman. You were a huge star who took a small part for the experience, not the money. Those were the days.
