Bruce Willis

Something different from the straight reviews; having recently seen Glass a couple of times lately I was struck by just how good Bruce Willis can be on his day, so decided to do a little top five list of his best / most enjoyable / memorable performances on screen.  He has certainly been in some turkeys, but has also turned in a few in which there is much to be enjoyed.  He has appeared in films collectively grossing over $2.5bn, so he must be doing something right.


John McClane (Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Live Free or Die Hard, A Good Day to Die Hard)

Having starred in Moonlighting on television for 66 episodes, and turned his hand to music with the album The Return of Bruno in 1987,  Die Hard was the film which propelled Willis into the big time.  Not only did the film set the template for most action movies for years to come - see Under Siege (Die Hard on a Battleship) Olympus Has Fallen (Die Hard in the White House) etc etc ad nauseam, but Willis' performance as John McClane, the ordinary everyman New York detective caught up in a terrorist attack on an LA skyscraper which gave the film that extra something. Tautly directed by John McTiernan (Predator, The Hunt for Red October) the film mixes suspense, with sporadic bursts of violence, some big explosions, and no small amount of humour - see McClane's ongoing radio dialogue with LA Patrol Cop Al Powell (Reginald Veljohnson), the only man on the outside who believes him, and the FBI Agents Johnson and Johnson ("no relation").  Willis wisecracks his way through the nightmare scenario, but never in a cheesy manner, and by the end of the film his character has taken a hefty beating on more than one occasion, emerging into the Christmas night limping, bloodied and bruised; no Superhero style invincibility here.  Ultimately he brings a likeable humanity to the reluctant hero, which endeared him to audiences worldwide.  Die Hard grossed $83m domestic / $140.8m worldwide, and spawned 4 sequels of varying quality, with a sixth film, apparently a Godfather 2 style prequel and sequel in the works.

See also Joe Hallenbeck in The Last Boy Scout, an exaggerated version of essentially the same character.

David Dunn (Unbreakable, Split - cameo, Glass)

A world away from the action of Die Hard, is M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable.  A supernatural, comic book influenced thriller, in which Willis played David Dunn (now there's a superhero's alter ego name if ever there was one), the sole survivor of a horrific train crash, which kills everyone else on board.  Not only does he inexplicably survive, but he's virtually untouched.  He is contacted by a mysterious stranger, Elijah Price (Samuel L Jackson, in one of several appearances alongside Willis) who is convinced that David is one of a very select group of people with special abilities about which they don't know.  He embarks on a sort of superhero vigilante campaign, spurred on by visions he experiences when bumping into or touching people.  The rain poncho he wears resembles a superhero's outfit.  Once again the film largely rests on Willis' quiet, understated performance, which evinces confusion, disbelief, determination, faith and courage.  Satisfyingly there is an explanation for the events as they unfold, but never really for the source of David's strength.  It's a haunting, mysterious film, made all the stronger (no pun intended) for Willis' restrained performance.

Unbreakable grossed $95m domestic / 248m worldwide and eventually became the first part of a trilogy, with two sequels almost two decades later, Split, and Glass rounding out the story.

As a side note it's worth bracketing this with the role of Malcolm Crowe, in Shyamalan's breakthrough feature, The Sixth Sense.  Clearly the two work well together, and the director certainly brings out the modest best in his star.

James Cole (12 Monkeys)

Another role strikingly at odds with the wise-cracking action hero persona traditionally associated with Willis, 12 Monkeys, directed by Monty Python's Terry Gilliam, is an intense, psychological, time-travelling race-against-time drama-thriller, inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 film La Jetée, and scripted by David Peoples (Blade Runner, Unforgiven).  He plays James Cole, a convict in the year 2035, in which the world has been devastated by a virus which killed most of the planet's population and rendered the surface uninhabitable.  In exchange for parole, he is sent back in time to stop the release of the virus.  As one would expect from an eccentric genius such as Gilliam, the film is all over the place, but in a good way.  Cole pings back and forth through time as the boffins in the future try to perfect the time travel process. The virus is / was released in 1996, hence this is the target destination.  But initially he ends up in 1990, where he is incarcerated in a mental asylum, meeting the frenetically bonkers Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) and psychiatrist Kathryn Reilly (Madeleine Stowe); he is returned to the future, then is mistakenly sent to the battlefields of World War One, where he incurs a bullet wound to the leg.  Finally arriving in 1996 he is able to set about his mission.  Throughout this instability the audience has to work not to be utterly wrong-footed.  Willis' Cole is by turns scared, confused and disorientated, then determined.  His acting skills really tie the picture together, not only acting as a calming counterpoint to Pitts mania, but giving the audience a figure with whom to identify. It's a standout role.

12 Monkeys took $57m domestic / $111.7m worldwide and gave rise to an unlikely television series, to date running to four series.

Butch Coolidge (Pulp Fiction)

Quentin Tarantino's sprawling crime epic won countless awards (an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and not least the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival) and proved to be often imitated but never equaled or bettered.  Split into distinct chapters it interweaves stories of a disparate set of characters.  Willis plays washed-up boxer Butch in the segment entitled "The Gold Watch".  He is paid by Gangster Marsellus Wallace to throw a fight, but he takes the payoff, bets on himself, and duly wins the about.  About to go on the run and leave the country with his girlfriend, he discovers that she forgot to bring his father's gold watch, which is the one thing Butch holds dear above all else.  What follows is a somewhat surreal odyssey through the darker echelons of Los Angeles, involving some unexpected and unsavoury sexual violence.  This section is only relevant to the main narrative, indeed Willis worked on it for only 18 days; it was conceived and written  independently by Tarantino's friend Roger Avary in 1990, before being incorporated into the main feature.  But its impact, and Willis' are marked.  "Bruce has the look of a 1950s actor.  I can't think of any other star that has that look", Tarantino later commented.  Although he doesn't have a huge amount to do, he certainly carries himself with that sort of swagger, and utters one of the film's coolest and most quotable lines: "Zed's dead, baby.  Zed's dead."  Taking a lower salary to appear in this relatively small independent film certainly paid off, not only in terms of his professional standing after a series of misfires, but also in the rewards from points earned against to the box office take.

From a budget of $8m, the film went on to make $108m domestic / $214m in total worldwide.

Korben Dallas (The Fifth Element)

Arguably falling back on the type of performance for which Willis is known best (Empire Magazine described it as a return "from his more demanding performances" , here he plays a wisecracking everyman, in this case a down on his luck taxi driver thrown into an extraordinary mission to save the Earth's destruction by "the Great Evil" .  But this is no Die Hard in space.  From the brain of crackpot French writer-director Luc Besson, The Fifth Element is part science fiction, part action, part comedy, pure comic book pulp hokum, but visually lavish, with costumes designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier and fantastic colourful visuals.  Willis is once again the hero and main character, but plays opposite a strong cast including a wildly OTT Gary Oldman, a wildly OTT Chris Tucker - I sense a pattern developing - Ian Holm, Milla Jovovich, John Neville, the supporting actor's supporting actor Brion James, Luke Perry (RIP), and even our very own Lee Evans.  For a film seriously unlike anything seen before it's to be commended that Willis more than holds his own amidst the chaos.  The one liners are still there, of course, (in response to Jovovich's stream of alien gobbledygook "Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and Bad English") but the comedy is broader than usual.  It's a fun film and a fine performance, serving as a tidy reminder of the actor's spectrum.

The Fifth Element took $63.8m at the US box office for a worldwide total of $263.9m