Bruce Willis names his favourite action movies
From the moment he came onscreen, Bruce Willis embodied everything that made an action star work. While not discounting his remarkable penchant for serious fodder, Willis was known for putting some of the most death-defying action scenes on the world’s stage, making every moviegoer feel like a badass every holiday season in Die Hard and doing it all with charming candour. Although Willis has his fair share of action classics, no one gets there without a few significant influences.
When Willis was brought up, his taste tended to cater to intense dramas like The Bridge on the River Kwai as the seriousness of Hollywood presented an intoxicating artistic allure. Even though there are more than a few nods to classic cinema, like Peter Sellers’s performance in Dr Strangelove, it’s easy to see how Willis’s taste slowly turned towards the dangerous side of the spectrum.
Among his favourites, Willis has previously listed The Godfather as one of his essential movies. Though not an action flick in the traditional sense, the way Francis Ford Coppola incorporated graphic depictions of mob hits was unlike anything cinema had ever seen upon release, sparing no expense about the savage beatings taken by those who did someone wrong.
While Coppola’s masterstroke still belongs in the world of heightened drama, Willis saw the actual range of action when watching films like Reservoir Dogs. Being one of Quentin Tarantino’s significant forays into the world of cinema, seeing the action onscreen between each of the film’s crooked characters is more than enough to get anyone enthralled by the first handful of scenes.
One other common thread between Willis’s favourite action films comes from the way they are shot. When talking about recent movies like 300 or Stanley Kubrick’s take on Spartacus in the early 1960s, there’s a specific fantastical element to how everything is shot. Rather than the one-dimensional badasses from movie serials that were known to save the damsel in distress, there’s an operatic quality to Willis’s favourite characters, as if it would be a Shakespearean tragedy if they were to fall from grace.
And more often than not, they do. Among his other favourites, movies like Raging Bull and Taxi Driver are the classic example of when that unbridled anger can be channelled incorrectly. While both Scorsese films may have had a few unsavoury moments between the characters, there’s still a certain degree of sympathy in every line that comes out of their mouth.
Then again, half the films on a list like this are indebted to what Willis did when working on films like Die Hard. Much like the characters in Reservoir Dogs, Willis’s John McClane was one of the first to prove that someone who appears to be a regular guy could do something extraordinary under the right circumstances.
The list of Willis’ favourite action movies shows that not only is he understanding of what truly defines the genre — blistering pace, powerful moments of human endeavour and the genius work of the director behind them — but that his love for cinema reaches far beyond the realm of categorisation.
While Willis may have quietly retired from acting as of late, his work throughout film history has done enough to put him alongside the films he loves. Regardless of the wear and tear that might get put on one’s body throughout the action genre, Willis is more about getting to the character’s heart before any explosions or combat scenes.
Bruce Willis’s favourite action movies
- Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
- Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960)
- Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
- Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)
- 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006)
