‘Hostage’: The movie Bruce Willis made to subvert his persona
If you see that Bruce Willis is in a movie, then you probably know what you’re getting: Lots of action, lots of explosions, the odd quip here and there.
This formula has made the shiny-headed sensation a household name, but there’s much more to him than you might expect.
The thing about Willis is that he has never allowed himself to be constricted by what other people expect from him. Alongside the usual stuff he is best known for, the star has also appeared in a number of other films that don’t involve him shooting someone in the face. He plays a wimpy guy caught between two powerful women in Death Becomes Her and has voiced a baby’s inner monologue in Look Who’s Talking. He’s even appeared in a Wes Anderson movie, playing a small-island police officer in Moonrise Kingdom.
It turns out that a desire to play against type was what drove him to make the film Hostage, an adaptation of a novel by Robert Crais. Speaking to the BBC while promoting the movie, he revealed that he had become tired of being associated with one type of character and wanted to try something a little different.
“Turning the novel into a film was a big opportunity for me to make a movie that had some action and that was also a psychological thriller that wasn’t ‘a Bruce Willis movie’. Because of the success of a couple of films I’ve done, like the Die Hard series and Armageddon and things like that, I’ve saved the world six or seven times now, so I think that audiences have expected me to win and save the day and this story was about a guy who doesn’t look like he’s going to win,” he explained.
He highlighted how this was the plan all along to keep the viewers guessing, and he teamed up with the director to ensure success in this regard, saying, “It looks like he’s going to lose. The director Florent-Emilio Siri and I worked very hard at constructing a story that had multiple obstacles in it, both emotional, psychological and physical obstacles.”
Released in 2005, Hostage is a thriller in which Willis plays Jeff Talley, a former police negotiator, emotionally scarred from a previous case gone awry. However, he is drawn back into the fold when a mob accountant and his family are held captive by three teenagers. It may not be a million miles away from Willis’ usual fare, but it doesn’t cast him as an all-conquering, impervious hero, which is precisely what he wanted. Unfortunately, everybody else batted for him to go back to his roots.
Hostage grossed just $77million on a $75m budget, deeming it a flop. What’s more, critics absolutely hated it, with the Rotten Tomatoes summary of the film calling it “gristly and cliched”. To make matters worse, Willis’ other release that year, Sin City, while a comic book masterpiece, was still tonally in the wheelhouse of career signature, and was a massive success both critically and financially. The actor himself was forced to concede how great it was, which must have been a bitter pill to wash down.
While audiences might not have been all that keen on seeing Willis switch things up, at least he had the chance to give it a proper go. In a business where it’s easy to stick to what you know, this iconic hardman was always on the lookout for something new to sink his teeth into. It didn’t always work out, but that’s besides the point.
