Why the last decade of Bruce Willis’ career demands to be recontextualised
Not many actors can manage to maintain superstardom over a number of decades, but for a while, it looked as though Bruce Willis had abandoned all hopes of restoring his career to its former glories in favour of sleepwalking his way through a never-ending succession of low-rent action thrillers.
The vultures began to circle in increasing numbers as the legendary action hero who’d steered Die Hard to classic status, anchored Michael Bay’s Armageddon with his grizzled stoicism, headlined M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Best Picture’-nominated The Sixth Sense, played the straight man in Luc Besson’s bonkers The Fifth Element, weaponised his baggage to phenomenal effect in Rian Johnson’s Looper, and worked with many of the most prominent directors in the industry embraced the VOD circuit.
2013 proved to be a bankable year for Willis after A Good Day to Die Hard and G.I. Joe: Retaliation combined to earn almost $700million at the box office, but the next decade saw him restricted almost entirely to the realm of B-tier genre flicks where he’d occasionally play a leading role, mostly show up to lend support, collect a decent-sized paycheque for his troubles, and move onto the next one.
Between 2014 and 2022, he lent his name to a whopping 41 films, with a dozen of them released in the latter year alone. Of that number, the only ones to secure a wide theatrical release were Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (which bombed), Rock the Kasbah (which bombed), the Death Wish remake (which bombed), The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (where he voiced himself as John McClane in a cameo), Motherless Brooklyn (which bombed), Split (where he had seconds of screentime), and Glass.
Suffice to say, the majority of his output was not great, with prolific producer and VOD veteran Randall Emmett swiftly becoming the most recurring collaborator of his entire career, with Willis notching dozens of credits where Emmett was part of the team behind the scenes. There were accusations of slumming it, phoning it in, turning up to go through the motions for an easy payday, and a complete disinterest in his profession, sentiments that were turned completely on their heads in March 2022.
When Willis’ family announced he’d been diagnosed with aphasia – which was eventually followed by another diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia – it completely recontextualised what sadly turned out to be the final decade of his career. At the time, the Golden Raspberry Awards had created a bespoke trophy for ‘Worst Performance by Bruce Willis’ on account of his continuous stream of subpar movies, which was quickly withdrawn.
From there, many former colleagues came forward to share stories of how Willis often had to be fed his lines through an earpiece, often had trouble communicating what he was trying to say, and became forgetful. Without context, it sounds like an actor being unprepared and unbothered, but his cognitive decline instantly repainted it as somebody doing everything in their power to continue doing the job they loved in the face of irreversible circumstances.
It tragically transpired that Willis wasn’t a fallen A-lister coasting through an inordinate number of credits but a lifelong actor who knew they’d have to walk away eventually for reasons they couldn’t control. He wasn’t doing it for the sake of a quick buck; he was trying to work as often as he could and make as much money as possible before his livelihood was ripped away from him, which is why the latter stages of his career were instantly placed in a completely different context.
