This week, it was revealed that Bruce Willis has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, following on from his aphasia diagnosis last year. It’s another sad episode in the latest chapter of Willis' life, and has been met with an outpouring of support for him and his loved ones. However, while Willis is worthy of our sympathy, he deserves our respect and admiration much more. The last decade and a half has seen Willis star in increasingly terrible movies, in part because his star was diminishing butmostly because some of his management were abusing his deteriorating conditionto sign him on for quick and lucrative projects without his consent. When we think of Bruce Willis, these are not the moments we should think of.
Bruce Willis is the greatest action star of all time. I don’t think it’s even that close. I know Tom Cruise does all his own stunts, Keanu Reeves revived the genre for modern audiences, while Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger both melded action with comedy in creative ways, but none of them have the charisma, range, or pull of Bruce Willis. All of those stars have their go-to franchise, just as Willis has Die Hard, but a) Die Hard with a Vengeance is better than any movie any of those people have ever been in and I will take no further questions at this time, and b) Willis has far more variety in thesortsof action movies he’s in. While he stayed in action more than most - I wouldn’t argue he’s a better actor than Reeves or Cruise - that has only helped solidify him as a god of the genre whose memory is to be cherished.
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Let’s set aside Die Hard. We’ll take it as read that we all love the first and third, enjoy the second, and then mumble mumble. The trope of a reluctant action star forced into heroism predates Willis, but his uniquely gruff interpretation of resenting his own success is what makes Willis far more grounded and easier to root for in the likes of The Last Boy Scout and one of my personal favourite performances of his, 16 Blocks. It’s easy to be the cool hero everyone loves, but Willis' total rejection of this made him far more compelling on the screen.
Willis was not rigidly locked into this trope, though he did always excel when he was beaten down. Sin City, Lucky Number Slevin, 12 Monkeys, Unbreakable, and The Fifth Element all showcase this to varying degrees, then there’s his most famous turn after Die Hard - Pulp Fiction. That’s before you take in his films where he leaned away from these stereotypes, but still added a sense of grit, like The Sixth Sense or Death Becomes Her. Willis has a brilliantly accomplished career and that should be how we think of him.
Of course, we shouldn’t forget his later catalogue entirely. That even someone as famously masculine and testosterone-fuelled as Bruce Willis can be taken advantage of in this way is a stark reminder that anyone can be the victim of abuse, and the crimes of those who used Willis and his image this way, putting him and his co-stars in danger by placing him on stunt-heavy sets with low cognitive faculty, should not be forgotten. But they also should not be part of Willis' legacy, and to remember his catalogue with sadness is to do the man a disservice.
I wrote last year, when Willis' aphasia diagnosis was revealed, thathe deserves an honorary Oscar, and I stand by it. While his typical seat-filler fare would never be in the running for the Academy Awards, that he was shut out of even a nomination for 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom has always felt like an oversight. Last year, the Razzies in their typically mean-spirited fashion nominated Willis several times in the category Worst Performance in a 2021 Movie By Bruce Willis,a category they were forced to scrap in an embarrassing climbdownwhen it emerged Willis had been abused into taking the roles.
The Razzies have clearly learned nothing, having to apologise again this year for nominating a child (who by all accounts did a decent job with a bad script) for Worst Actress. It benefits art to have a robust system of critics who will interrogate rather than gleefully clap at anything that moves, but the Razzies have never been critics, but instead trolls cackling at easy targets. It’s petty to suggest Willis deserves an Oscar just to get back at the Razzies, but it’s more that Willis has spent his whole career being largely undervalued, and that has only been exacerbated by his latest slew of cheap B-flicks.
Bruce Willis is an all-time great of the movie business, and that is how he ought to be thought of. We should feel a great sense of sadness and sympathy as he battles through his debilitating disease, but we should never let that blind us to what he achieved.
