A Tribute to Bruce Willis Concluded: Some of His Biggest Bombs That Probably Affected His Career Trajectory

Like so many actors after Willis had the smash hit Die Hard, he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and not be so wed to the label ‘action star’. There were some signs that his talent in Moonlighting was not a fluke: in 1989, he received solid reviews for his role as Vietnam veteran back home in Norman Jewison’s In Country. In 1990, he seemed prepared to show he could dominate every field. He starred in Die Hard 2, a solid sequel (and one that in some ways I actually prefer to the original). That Christmas, he was one of the leads in a film that looked from the outside like a sure thing for Oscars. Unfortunately by the time of its release, there was a stench of death around it. That film was Bonfire of the Vanities.

I won’t go into the mess that Bonfire turned out to be (there have literally been entire books written about the subject) except to say the movie was one of the weirdest disasters in the history of box office bombs. Usually a film with such a horrible reputation (Ishtar or Heaven’s Gate to mention two of the most cited examples) ends up completely wrecking somebody’s career. Elaine May never directed a movie after Ishtar and in the case of Heaven’s Gate, it more or less led to the end of director’s having complete reign during the studio system. But Bonfire of the Vanities didn’t wreck Brian DePalma’s career: he continues to make films and has actually box office and critical successes afterwards. Nor did it torpedo or even slow down the career paths of most of the leads, Willis, Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, Kim Catrall and Morgan Freeman have done just fine after the film. (Then again, Freeman has his named removed from the credits but its not like people didn’t recognize him.) And it didn’t even slow down the process of film adaptations of incredibly complicated best selling novels: Silence of the Lambs and Prince of Tides did just fine with the critics and the box office the very next year. It basically stands alone as a cinematic lemon, one of those disastrous movies that were a complete waste of all the talent involved. It’s not like that’s stopped after the movie ending.

And really, it’s hard to blame Willis for any part in the movie’s failure. Yes, his character Peter Fallow was British and he didn’t even try and do an accent, but the fact of Willis’ miscasting was hardly the greatest failure of the movie. I don’t recall his even being held out for particular scorn in most of the reviews: most of that is blamed rightly on the adaptation more than any performances. What was actually worse for him was the following year when he appeared in four films, none of which were particularly good (Mortal Thoughts was essentially a vehicle that he did with then-wife Demi Moore) and one which would have destroyed a lesser career.

In retrospect, it’s hard to figure out exactly what was wrong with Hudson Hawk, the caper comedy that really did a number on Willis’ career. It may be a little too whimsical but there’s very little difference in tone from the Steven Soderbergh version of Ocean’s 11 and that has basically become a franchise.  I will grant you aside from Willis, there’s none of the star power that comes with Ocean’s but there are some fairly decent character actors which also made the Ocean’s films a success: Hawk featured Danny Aiello, James Coburn, Richard E. Grant and the incredibly young future TV stars  David Caruso and Lorraine Toussaint. Was Andie MacDowell miscast as the romantic lead? Perhaps, but MacDowell spent far too much of her career in the 1990s coasting on her perceived charm.  And in a way, you might argue Hudson Hawk was ahead of its time – Willis’ having to steal a  Da Vinci work of art in order to plot world domination is more or less the story behind so much of Dan Brown’s work, only not even pretending to take itself seriously. Was it simply too clever for its own good? You do get that feeling from a lot of jokes in the movie, which do have a lot of the feel of the too-clever TV comedies of the next decade. Whatever the reason, the film sunk like a stone on Memorial Day in 1991 and it did close off at least one part of Willis’ career. It is the only movie he ever had a screenwriting credit for. He never tried that again.

The next year his major feature was another attempt at satire: Death Becomes Her. He plays Dr. Ernest Melville, a skilled surgeon who early in his life gets caught between two women who are in a rivalry to the death…and beyond that. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn play two women who spend decades trying to outdo each other, and Willis plays a schlub, whose only job is use the makeup he puts on cadavers on the women who control him. He spends almost the entire movie in a drunken daze, and as the plot takes on a very supernatural tone, he seems unable to react appropriately. (Seeing Streep’s character with a broken neck after she fell down the stairs, he can only cry out: “It’s a miracle!”)

 Poor Ernest soon realizes that not even death is going to free him from these women, and shows himself to be basically the only character in the film that develops a backbone and courage. In the most critical scene in the film, Streep and Hawn implore him to drink the motion so he can survive a fall that will surely kill him. Initially pleading, when he hesitated, their tones become caws. About to drink, he pours the potion out and simply says: “Sorry girls. You’re on your own,” and then plunges to what he presumes will be his death. The fact that he ends of surviving isn’t a cheat; the movie ends at his funeral decades in the future and we learn that effectively he actually got the eternal life and youth the girls were seeking, just without any of the consequences that must face.

I will admit that Death Becomes Her is no masterpiece and it never makes up its mind whether it wants to be a screwball comedy or a dark satire. But parts of it do work very well, and most of them are the parts that Willis is in. Even then Willis was known for playing dynamic characters; Ernest is a schlub for most of the movie who spends it basically being led by the nose.  Willis plays things for a laugh by speaking in a far more agitated tone than we’re used to  -usually his characters are calm in the face of crisis; Ernest is always in a state of panic and it works. He would try this level of franticness occasionally in his career – most notably in the cult film 12 Monkeys a few years later – but he rarely tried to go this outside of his comfort zone when it came to comedy for the rest of his career.

1994 showed two of the high points of Willis’ career (I listed them in the previous entry) and two of his absolute worst. You can’t really blame him for everything that went wrong in North because that film should have never gotten past the screenplay stage and frankly, Willis’ role was the least embarrassing part in it. (That tells you how horrible it is.)  I actually think the film that I truly wonder why Willis chose that same year, Color of Night, an excruciating waste of time, an erotic thriller that is neither erotic nor thrilling.

The only excuse for this film being made was the desire to match the box office success of Basic Instinct. This led to a series of unwatchable films, but this is the one that you really what anybody was thinking. The so called femme fatale is Jane March, who’d made her debut in the ‘art house film’ The Lover at the age of eighteen, a film where she basically appears in it naked half the time in scenes with a man twice her age.

March has never been a good actress and while some might be able to justify quality in The Lover as an ‘art’ film, it doesn’t change the fact that is not much further up from kiddie porn. It’s actually worse in Color of Night because Willis was forty and she was barely twenty one. The best thing you can say about the sex scenes is they are consensual; the worst is they leave you feeling disgusted that you’ve tuned into this movie on late night cable. (Yes that’s when I saw it. I’m not proud.)

For all the exploitation in Basic Instinct and most of its rip-off, at least the women were of age.  There is a point in this movie where all the members of a group therapy that Willis is leading, admit they’ve had sex with March’s character without knowing it was the same girl. That is the level of intellect this movie has, when it’s trying at all. I can’t imagine what Willis thinks when he considers 1994, when he had a supporting role in one of the greatest movies of all time, and in two of cinema’s greatest disasters.

Willis spent the lion’s share of the remainder of his career,  breaking between some movies that were ambitious as his earlier work – the sly comedy Bandits, the well-filmed Sin City series) and some genuine horrible box office hits (Armageddon) but would spent far too much of the 21^st Century playing off his tough guy images. Some of them were very good films – RED, a self-describe AARP action movie is one of personal favorites – but with few exception he would rarely try anything as ambitious as much of his work in the 1990s was.  Even before his diagnosis the lion’s share of his films had increasingly become by-the-numbers action movies that didn’t show any of the flexing that some of his contemporaries in that same period (Schwarzenegger in quite a few horror films; Stallone in the Creed series). I can’t help but feel that this was less about trying to stay close to this brand and more being gun-shy (there’s a term I never thought I’d use in conjunction with Willis) from the failures in the first half of the 1990s when he tried to show his range.

To be clear, even if Willis had managed to try to get out of his comfort zone, I don’t think he’d ever be considered at the same level as Hanks or Penn, some of the better actors he actually worked with. But I do think his career might mirror that of, say, Charlton Heston an action star throughout his career who starred in some of the biggest critical hits of all time (to be fair, he did win an Oscar for Ben-Hur)  but found himself spending much of his second half going through the motions in far too many action and sci-fi rip-offs when later work (I think of his performance as The Player King in Kenneth Brannagh’s Hamlet) showed that he had talent he was rarely given an opportunity to show. Willis was so much more than the action star we knew him to be, and those who know him only for Die Hard should really know about the times he reached for the horizon and sometimes touched it.