SF STAR WILLIS EXITS THE SCREEN

Bruce Willis as Korben Dallas, THE FIFTH ELEMENT.

Some of our screen heroes seem to last forever, like the virtually invincible Bill Shatner, 91 years old and still going strong. Others, sadly, are only impervious to harm in the movies, like the star of many a science fiction classic, Bruce Willis. We got the news this week that Willis is retiring from his acting career of just over 35 years due to a diagnosis of aphasia, or, as my dictionary defines it, the inability to understand or produce speech.

Aphasia is usually the result of brain damage caused by trauma, illness or stroke. His family has not announced details about the cause or prognosis of his condition. But it is known that he sued Revolution Studios for unspecified damages related to a blow to his forehead that he received during "ultrahazardous activity" involved in the filming of TEARS OF THE SUN in 2003. The suit claims the injury has caused him extreme mental, physical and emotional pain and suffering. Film producers and directors working with Willis on recent projects have noted he’s had difficulties remembering his lines and was disoriented onset, despite accommodations made to help him.

Whatever the cause of his decline, I’ve been a fan of Willis’s since his days playing private eye David Addison opposite Cybill Shephard in television’s Moonlighting (which ran on ABC from 1985 to 1989), the role which launched his career and garnered him an Emmy and a Golden Globe. And Willis is two years younger than I am. So this one kinda hit me hard.

Of course, even before his five-year stint on Moonlighting ended, Willis had begun his wildly successful career as an action film star with DIE HARD in 1988. That film spawned four sequels and a handful of video games, as well as being selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2017 by the United States Library of Congress as a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" film.

In the first of his collaborations with director Quentin Tarantino, Willis played an aging boxer in the pay of mob boss Ving Rhames in 1994’s PULP FICTION. He brought his trademark combination of toughness and vulnerability to the role, giving the character of Butch, in love with his air-headed girl and just trying to survive at the ignominious end of a boxing career, a pathos he might not otherwise have had. It may be hard to watch this performance now in light of Willis’s own deteriorating mental condition. The actor starred in two other Tarantino-adjacent projects, Robert Rodriguez’s SIN CITY (2005) (an adaptation of a Frank Miller graphic novel) and the Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration GRINDHOUSE/PLANET TERROR (2007), both of which featured the highly stylized cinematography, dystopian vision and over-the-top violence that is the hallmark of both directors’ grindhouse style.

For science fiction film fans like me, it’s that kind of work in our favorite genre that will live on beyond any of his other creative efforts. Several of his roles are iconic; the films themselves are cult classics; and, like SIN CITY, the stories they portray are popular across several media. Take the first of these films, 12 MONKEYS, from 1995, directed by Terry Gilliam and costarring Brad Pitt and Madeline Stowe. This story of a convict (Willis playing James Cole) sent back in time to investigate the sources of a virus that has wiped out 99 percent of the human population, garnered an Oscar nomination for Pitt, and spun off a successful television show of the same name on the Syfy Channel from 2015 to 2018.

Then there is THE FIFTH ELEMENT (1997), helmed by well-known SF director Luc Besson and costarring Gary Oldman and a host of others. The plot of this futuristic mashup is mostly nonsense (Willis plays taxi driver/former commando Korben Dallas), but the effects are a delight for the eyes and the film has become a favorite of SF fans.

The disaster/action film ARMAGEDDON from 1998 has much broader appeal, with a cast drawn from Hollywood A-listers like Willis, Ben Afleck, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton, Will Patton and others. Plus, though the plot has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese, it was written by Jonathan Hensleigh (of DIE HARD fame) and J.J. Abrams (of too many films to count) and directed by action king Michael Bay. NASA shows this film about a mission to divert a killer asteroid by drilling into it and setting off nuclear explosives to blow it to bits to its managers in training for them to spot the errors. Spoiler alert: There are a lot of them.

Willis’s next film was a complete departure from his work in action movies. As child psychologist Malcolm Crowe in M. Night Shyamalan’s THE SIXTH SENSE he is subdued, empathetic, even, as his film client (Cole Sears, played by the astounding Haley Joel Osment) notes, “sad.” But he is determined to help Cole, who “sees dead people,” even at the risk of sacrificing his troubled marriage (to an equally depressed Olivia Williams), to gain redemption for a patient who committed suicide in his home at the beginning of the film (a young and nearly unrecognizable Donnie Wahlberg). This is a great film with a twist that gets me even with repeated viewings and offers possibly Willis’s best performance ever.

That is a tough call, though, when put up against his work in another Shyamalan film, UNBREAKABLE, from 2000. I love this film for its exploration of the comic book tropes of the invincible superhero (with a key vulnerability)—in this case Willis’s character David Dunn, who is impervious to injury, but vulnerable to water—and his corresponding nemesis, Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone syndrome. The film was the first of Shyamalan’s so-called “Eastrail 177” trilogy, which includes SPLIT (2016) starring James McAvoy as serial killer Kevin Crumb, and GLASS (2019) which brings all three characters together in a grand finale. Again, Willis owns this role by underplaying it, bringing a sort of baffled “why me?” resignation to his newfound abilities, hoping to avoid notice for his good deeds.

Finally, I should mention Willis’s role in the best conception of time travel on film, 2012’s LOOPER, costarring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blount. I’ve seen dozens of films about time travel and virtually all of them gave me a headache. But LOOPER is the one film I’ve seen where a time paradox is acknowledged and resolved in a most satisfying way. Kudos to writer/director Rian Johnson for developing something that is rare in Hollywood—an original idea. Willis plays the older version of Gordon-Levitt’s time-traveling gun-for-hire character in this film and brings the proper world-weariness to the role.

After GLASS in 2019, Willis continued to work at a frenetic pace, but in mostly B-grade actioners, voiceover work, shorts and cameos. He made nine films in 2021, none of them of any particular note, one of them so bad it was worthy of a special Razzy Award (which has since been withdrawn due to his disability). Despite his problems, he has completed eight more films for release later this year and next.

Bruce Willis has created an incredible body of work over a relatively short career. Maybe he just has an impressive work ethic. Or maybe something was pushing him to produce as much as he could before Fate took a hand. In any case, those of us who love the movies—especially science fiction movies—will be the ones who benefit. Thank you, Bruce, for all you have given us.

Cheers, Donna