Bruce all 'mighty'

Hollywood diaries

Bruce Willis is now 60 years old. Hand the man a bus pass. And give him a role that’ll let this king of reinventions connect with his audience again. Because when he feels like doing it, Willis can snap to attention, sock a part over, and feel like a suffering icon of popcorn art between the quips.

Alas, over the last decade or so, it’s frequently been hard to tell him apart from his Madame Tussauds effigy. Two Die Hard sequels, one adequate, one atrocious. Two Sin Cities, two REDs, two Expendables ... Just the two? He wanted $1 million a day for the third, and was booted out in favour of Harrison Ford. “Greedy and lazy… a sure formula for career failure,” tweeted his former business partner Sylvester Stallone, after making the swap.

Stallone isn’t the only one who’s griped about Willis’s shrugging, show-me-the-money work ethic. When Kevin Smith released his flop buddy-comedy, the aptly named Cop Out, he described the star’s refusal to promote it as “soul-crushing”.

Career gone kaput

Let’s face it: there’s a glaring lack of joy or commitment to the current Willis oeuvre. His speciality as an actor, ironically enough, has always been eye-rolling about how things could hardly get much worse. But with stuff like The Whole Ten Yards, Alpha Dog and Perfect Stranger tucked in between the blockbuster paydays, this whole attitude can feel uncomfortably close to the professional truth.

Even so, there are still glimmers out there of the better actor — and the considerably more appealing movie star — Willis remains capable of being. He was a major asset to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom — in fact, arguably the best thing in it, as a lonely and dithering sheriff.

He was nicely in on the joke in Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, made some real effort in 16 Blocks and picked well with the tricksy time-travel thriller Looper and the somewhat underrated Surrogates.

None of these could quite be called Willis revivals to hang your hat on, admittedly. Like Matthew’s McConaissance or Witherspoon’s Reesurgences, it’s reached the point where we’re in sorely need of some kind of Bruce boost.

It’s happened before. Few stars have plummeted from megawatt hero of the hour to box-office poison, and then back, with such whiplash velocity. But then, few have ever found an instant star-making turn as definitive as Die Hard.

Willis was a popular comedian in the shoulder-padded 1980s TV series Moonlighting, which gave him all his early chances to smoulder, play up a smirking arrogance and crack wise. But John McClane was the action-hero role to put all others to shame, not to mention a lateral-move casting coup for the ages.

It’s his Rocky or Rambo or Indy, but Willis is much more approachable — more of a regular guy, dirtying up that white vest and sighing constantly at his terrible day — than any of the above. You could say Willis has spent the rest of his career playing variations on that signature, irresistibly cynical character. But that wouldn’t be entirely fair.

The half-decade in Die Hard’s wake is a cautionary tale for any newly-minted A-list star who just rocketed to fame off the back of a single hit. That perfect, steel-and-glass construct of an 80s action movie was made for a tight $28 million and took $140 million worldwide.

‘Die Hard’ days

The sequel, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, added $100 million to that total, but with a much higher budget, which it largely blew on being ridiculous. Everything about it is self-parodic, starting with the title. So it’s harder for McClane to die? How does that work, jeopardy-wise? Or is it the baddies who are dying, harder?

The real trouble didn’t start until the early 90s, when Willis was top of every casting list on all the wrong projects. Watching him spring into action, desperate to show us he had dramatic range, was akin to a circus debacle with the top-heavy strongman trying to flaunt non-existent trapeze skills for the hell of it.

For starters, he was hideously deployed as the seedy hack Peter Fallow in Bonfire of the Vanities — not exactly miscast, since boozing sleazebags aren’t a million miles from the Willis persona we know, but forced into unwieldy caricature without a firm handle on what he was doing. The film was an epochal calamity and he took his share of fallout.

Hudson Hawk, just a year later, was in some ways a braver folly, but it also had the acutely embarrassing look of a passion project — he co-wrote the damn thing, and had to do those cringe-worthy sing-a-long-a-heist routines. The shine was fast coming off the Willis brand, not helped by his supporting role in another megaflop, the neglected period gangster flick Billy Bathgate.

We’ll make an exception for his nebbishy plastic surgeon in Death Becomes Her — a moderate commercial hit and durable camp classic which did give him some good comic opportunities.

Bald & beautiful

His saviour was Quentin Tarantino, who threw him a life raft of a role as Butch, the rebel boxer in Pulp Fiction. It was the first use of Willis as a movie star in the same way that Robert Mitchum was — a delve into hard-boiled archetype, which would serve Willis nicely again as Hartigan in Sin City. Tarantino’s seal of approval, in the most critically adored and talked-about American film of that year, just about redeemed him, exactly as it did John Travolta.

Embracing his baldness around this point, the star was finally threatening to become respectable, debatably for the first time, though he’d won awards for Moonlighting and actually bagged a Golden Globe nomination for a little-seen part, as a troubled Vietnam vet in Norman Jewison’s In Country. He was great, tough and laconically moving in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys — a risky film that worked out splendidly for all involved. That probably remains his best performance to date.

Willis didn’t need to worry about the box-office for a little while, after Armageddon and The Sixth Sense came out. The latter was one of his more testing and unexpected assignments; he was required to button things down, carry off the big twist and register it as a profound existential shock, an even deeper surprise than it was to the rest of us.

This repeat-view phenomenon got six Oscar nominations and he couldn’t have been far off scoring one himself. When he immediately signed on to M Night Shyamalan’s next project, the interesting if messy Unbreakable, we’re looking at peak Willis in terms of his industry position and command of his craft.

Even now, Willis’s wise-guy appeal wouldn’t be ageing badly at all, if it weren’t that this endless run of shoot-’em-ups keep freezing his face into the same set of obligatory expressions. Is it just that his choices lately have lacked inspiration, or mortgage payments are an increasing burden, or that the Tarantinos and Gilliams of this world haven’t thought to pick up the phone?

At the moment, the curse of Bruce Willis’s career is more or less that he sees dead people, all the time. But he shows no sign as yet of wanting to throw in the towel. Forthcoming projects (a reunion with Shyamalan on the road-trip romantic drama Labour of Love, a Barry Levinson comedy called Rock the Kasbah, the next Woody Allen, a Broadway version of Misery) may not have the ring of major comebacks about them.

But it would be premature to give up on him outright. There’s no telling when lightning might strike and give Willis that Wrestler or Birdman moment — the soul-baring, ripped-from-the-guts self-portrait that shows us what he’s still got left.