It is difficult to keep up with Bruce Willis’ filmography, especially since 2015. In recent years, the star’s IMDb page has swelled with a torrent of action productions that drowned out the occasional ambitious work like “Motherless Brooklyn” or “Glass”. Mnemonics are useful for tracking banal titles: “Hard Kill” followed by “First Kill”; “Trauma Center” takes place in … a trauma center. But in fact, anyone would be forgiven for mixing “Reprisal” with “Marauders” or “Acts of violence” with Willis’ most recent salary, “Breach” (available in select cinemas and on demand, which is where most of these films start their careers).
Leaving the title aside, “Breach”, a horror film set in space, stands out from the growing group in two ways.
The first is that Willis gets a decent screen time as a member of the team that helps Cody Kearsley (“Riverdale”) fight against a parasitic life form that is turning people into murderous ghouls. The fact that Willis is committed to a Willis film is not taken for granted because he tends to have an average of 15 minutes per presentation in his VOD work – it is his (quickly waning) reputation that the star rents, not his real presence.
But more important than Willis coming and going is that “Breach” can be watched – a modest quality, but, in this context, rarely achieved. Add bonus points if you’re not familiar with John Carpenter’s “Alien” and “The Thing”, which “Breach” heavily borrows from, create surprises; add a little more if you find it fun to see Thomas Jane exaggerating while wearing sunglasses inside a spaceship.
In Willisworld, this counts as an exuberant compliment.
As Jeff Ross said at actor Comedy Central’s party in 2018, “You’re like Elmer Fudd if he hunted bad scripts instead of horrible wabbits.”
It’s true that these films are mostly bad, and I have no pleasure in writing this: I really wanted at least some of them to be fun, not because I’m a big fan of the man behind John McClane, but because I film B long admired. At their best, they exhibit an ingenuity and resourcefulness that I prefer to the rise of Hollywood’s big-budget popcorn food; they also tend to make room for idiosyncratic and ridiculous performances (it is worth repeating that Thomas Jane is wearing sunglasses in space).
So, the sarcastic articles mocking Willis’ vehicles, or rather, squeaky jerks, only made me more curious: Are these films so horrible? And what do they say about the state of the cheap rental action?
Watching a dozen Willis films in the last half decade, patterns have emerged. What impressed me most is how much they trust the use of firearms. It is not just that violence is always linked to firearms, and vice versa, in this island film ecosystem – it is that guns and assault rifles and assault rifles are the main point. I saw more shootings than I could count, with an absurd number of bullets flying in orgies of machismo and terrible aim. “Hard Kill” (2020), which is among the worst in the group, actually starts with such an exhibition, then goes down.
And it’s not just the weapons – usually loaded tucked in the lower back, the idea of an action guy’s accessories – that are fetishized, but tactical equipment. SWAT cosplay in films like “Reprisal” (2018) would be ridiculously presumptuous if the real-world version weren’t so scary. The idea of masculinity these films project is worrying, to say the least – which is doubly strange because Willis at his peak was not the typical pumped-up action hero.
I understand, this is a fantasy, just like the kitchen in a rom-with Nancy Meyers. But in purely cinematic terms, the problem is that armed violence has replaced any attempt to create decent plots. Why try to think of twists and turns when you can just insert a shooting? By the way, why bother to think of a new story when you can do an assault and that’s it? Between planning, execution and the result (hint: it never goes well), robberies are the engine that drives an extraordinary number of these films.
As for Willis himself, he sits in the back seat – often literally. In the normal world, a second bill could still indicate an important role; in Willisworld, it means little. Sometimes he plays men who walk in suits, looking sarcastically superior, for a minute or two at a time. Sometimes he plays tired cops or ex-cops who spend a lot of time on the phone. (More isn’t necessarily better: one of Willis’ biggest roles in recent years was in the 2017 comic book hybrid, “Once upon a time in Venice”, which is a shame from top to bottom – it’s the one where he skates naked .)
Mostly Willis allows the designated leader to perform the action, as is. The best of guys doing the real work are the grayest and they, perhaps not by chance, tend to be in the best films, like Frank Grillo in “Reprisal”, Michael Chiklis in “10 Minutes Gone” and Christopher Meloni in “Marauders” – a release of 2016 which recently appeared in the Netflix Top 10 and is directed by low-teur Steven C. Miller, one of his three Willis films.
It may not be by chance that the films that bother giving women good roles tend to be above average – except 2015’s “Extraction”, which manages to get Gina Carano to call Kellan Lutz for help. In “Trauma Center” (2019), for example, Attorney Willis is a woman, played by Nicky Whelan, who must escape the rogue police officers who try to kill her in a closed hospital wing. This is as close to the “Die Hard” formula that a Willis film comes to today.
The favorite in my action spree was “Precious Cargo” (2016), a “Miami Vice” caper that gives Willis proxy Mark-Paul Gosselaar not one, but two worthy female foils, played by Claire Forlani and Jenna B. Kelly. “Precious Cargo” was also the funniest movie on my trip to modern cellulose cinema, which is not so difficult to do, since most of the competition seems to consider humor anathema to masculinity, along with basic English – although this “Hard Kill” question made me laugh: “Do you have anything planned for tonight? “
And there is much more to be expected in 2021, with Willis scheduled to appear in more science fiction with “Cosmic Sin”, a human hunt in “Apex”, criminal things in “Out of Death” and a thriller called “Midnight in the Switchgrass. ”There is still time to rename the latter as” Sudden Justice “or” Lethal Vengeance “.