Bruce Willis

kinda afraid to revisit 3 or 4 (which i'm tempted to defend as an '00s version of the searchers), but i'm sure 2 is the simple pro job i remember it being

5 was just atrociously boring

i guess i feel no need to revisit the sequels, you'd think one near-perfect die hard is enough, right?

whichever one w J Irons and SL Jackson was I saw that in the theater and hated it

i'd rather move on to other parts of the mctiernan canon, like uh the 13th warrior

xpost

2 ridic 4 ridic but both competent
13th warrior is GREAT

DH 2 was at the airport and co-starred John Amos as an evil but benign paramilitary officer helping a terrorist or something

john amos vs john stamos

if you haven't seen The Prince, get on that shit. kind of a student-film Taken

bruce willis is...... Out Of Death

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12528166/

??

In an interview with Vulture, director Mike Burns said that they planned to have Bruce Willis shoot all of his scenes across two days. However, due to COVID-19 shutdowns, Willis could only be on set for one day. Therefore, they filmed all of his scenes in a single day.

a new movie project can literally be "all in a day's work" for Bruce these days

morelike out of breath, amirite?

Out of Death is the best Helloween album imo

I don’t know if we can call what he does “work”

there was an amusing article in vulture abt these kinds of movies recently, calling them "geezer teasers"

Needs to do a movie with Steven Seagal IMO.

i fundamentally don't understand these movies. coming from the standpoint of someone who will watch shitty action movies: you have to have some standards. they tend to fail in being "so bad its good" also. like watch a recent nic cage or seagal, try and finish it, i dare you.

suggest remake of The Hidden Fortress with Bruce Willis, Nic Cage and Danny Trejo filmed in one day and then the rest deepfaked in the editing suite for 6 weeks

It bugs me how shameless Bruce Willis is about wasting his potential/ phoning in his performances. It's one thing to take roles in bad movies for the money, but he really goes out of his way to do the absolute bare minimum of acting in exchange for the paycheck. It wouldn't be so annoying if he weren't obviously capable of much more.

ClaudeRains.jpg

just to reaffirm the sentiment from the previous decade, Hudson Hawk remains a delight to watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd1eNS9HtXo

(Actually feature doesn't start until maybe minute 9)

Huh, I guess there are rumors he's been struggling mentally and physically? If so that's kind of sad that he's doing these shit movies rather than just retiring and enjoying old age. Though god knows, these movies can't possibly take much time out of his schedule.

The new category, titled “Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie,” includes the eight feature films that Willis made in 2021

https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/bruce-willis/razzie-awards-2021-nominees-bruce-willis-category-movies/

I found this comment under that video, so grain of salt, but:

I know quite a few people who worked on Apex. Most of the movie was shot with a picture double on Vancouver Island, with Bruce's coverage being shot by a different unit in Washington. The Vancouver Island shoot turned into an absolute nightmare, as they had hired an entirely unqualified non-union special effects department, which led to a couple of incidents where pyrotechnics went off without the crew on set being notified beforehand. This led to most of the camera department walking off the show, taking their carts and personal kits but leaving the rented gear behind. The rest of the movie was shot by the DP with the help of anyone who had any camera experience from the other departments. They were also unable to hire any union stunt performers or extras as an indie production during early covid, so most of the bad guys getting shot are actually random crew members in costume.

Jay is right in that Bruce's lines are being read to him through an earwig by the script supervisor, but unfortunately this is more due to dementia issues than laziness. The guy couldn't remember his lines if he tried, and often has issues interpreting direction and the instructions being given to him.

Other comments:

I have a buddy that worked on one of these movies last year in Vancouver.

He said it was really hard to watch Bruce struggle to just get his lines out. He was forgetting that he was filming a movie and they had to wait for him so they could record his lines.

They were not able to get everything they needed from Bruce because they only had him for a few days and then he was off the movie. They ran out of time to film all of his lines.

I'm not aware of the title of that movie but Bruce was actually in Vancouver for this one, in Nov 2021. Apparently the scripty would be reading him his lines as well as giving him direction on what to do, but he would often confuse the two and repeat his stage directions aloud. Kinda like saying "I'm getting too old for this shit. And now I'm sitting down on the couch to my right.

Pretty sad, honestly.

I generally like those Red Letter Media guys & that video was fun but yeah, even before reading those YouTube comments, I was surprised that it didnt occur to them as they were ripping on him that old age memory issues might have been a factor for the earpiece stuff

so basically elder abuse

I dont think Nic Cage is suffering from any mental issues (outside of just being Nic Cage) but it's a similar story for him, he's in a ton of movies that nobody knows about every year even outside of the cool critically acclaimed stuff like Mandy and Pig. Did you know there's a Nic Cage movie where he beats up a ton of animatronic animal robots that have been possessed by Satan? And that he does not speak an entire word throughout the whole film? And that it just came out last year??

The difference (and I am not a Cage fan at all, though I enjoyed Pig) is that Cage picks projects that are challenging — in an "I've never done anything like this, let's go" sense — and throws himself into them 100%, where Willis is clearly punching the clock and not the least bit invested in what he's working on. Whether it's because he's got dementia, or is just doing it for the money because his kids have no apparent life skills, the result is the same.

I never really thought of Willis as 'old', but he's 66, which is I guess is quite old, but not so old I would have immediately assumed memory issues were the reason he was having his lines fed to him through an earpiece. I didn't realize he's been mostly doing direct-to-video schlock for the last 8 years or so.

Yes that movie is good

Cage, though, famously (and publicly) spent millions on dumb shit like castles and comic books. I saw somewhere that claimed he burned through $150 million and also owed the IRS close to $20 million, so he def. needed the cash to maintain his lifestyle. But Willis? I have no idea. Looks like his most blatant cash ins began somewhere around 2008. 2012 he had both Moonrise Kingdom and Looper, but since then it's been pretty dire. The earpiece stuff is of course conjecture, but if you can't do your job, then ... retire, you know? Why do a high profile two-person stage play with a great actor if you can't do it? I wonder who is pushing him to do this stuff.

throws himself into them 100%,

This is an important distinction. Cage is def. in it to win it, no matter what loser of a movie he picks. But Willis? Those clips alone they show are so sad. He's barely acting, just reciting short lines with no enthusiasm.

Here's a look at that insane authorized deep fake Russian ad they mentioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp4jbs7ivSY

66 is old enough for dementia to be an issue-1 out of 5 of all Americans have signs of it by 60.

pacino also famously uses an earpiece

Yeah, but on stage I kind of get it. I mean, it's even a punchline in countless things I've seen since I was a kid: someone whispers "line" and some person at the lip or side of the stage gives it to them. That's really no different than having an earpiece. But that's also live theatre, basically one long take. These movies, not only are they not that, but the dialogue is pretty rudimentary, which makes it extra sad. The clips the RLM guys showed, it was like watching a NPC.

Dementia is also reportedly the reason that nearly all of Willis' DTV-era performances are given sitting down.

According to wikipedia, he's got at least seven movies due out this year. Is he hurting for money?

I mean, if it's such a struggle for him, for whatever reason, you'd think he could afford to coast for awhile.

If he’s mentally declining, and of course that’s just speculation at this point, he may not be in control of his career or life choices.

I think the first time I heard about an actor using an earpiece for as Johnny Depp some years back, which seemed unforgivably lazy. But maybe it’s commonplace?

According to wikipedia, he's got at least seven movies due out this year. Is he hurting for money?

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Tuesday, 8 February 2022 20:44 (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean, if it's such a struggle for him, for whatever reason, you'd think he could afford to coast for awhile.

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Tuesday, 8 February 2022 20:45 (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it looks like in a lot of these films he doesn't actually have much screen time and was only on set briefly? He was done filming this one in a single day, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Death

this Vulture article was referenced above, but I don't think it's been linked to yet

“With Bruce Willis, there’s almost a model for how he features in these movies,” Champ theorized. “One of my clients calls it a ‘geezer teaser’: You have Bruce Willis at the intro of the movie, so people are like, Great, this is a Bruce Willis movie. But he’s actually a secondary character who shows up sporadically.”

In most of Willis’s movies for EFO, “sporadic” would be a generous appraisal of his presence. The actor clocks just seven minutes of screen time in Hard Kill, and in Extraction, he spends less than nine minutes onscreen. In the home-invasion thriller Survive the Night, audiences get almost ten minutes out of the actor, even if they aren’t his best.

https://www.vulture.com/article/randall-emmett-movies.html

how the fuck do you make a movie where your lead is only on set for one day

Out of Death currently holds a 0% rating on movie aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes

oh

If he's really getting $1m each for these movies that only require a few days of minimal work, and he can do 10 a year, mentally declining or not, its not hard to imagine why he'd go all-in on them. It's not like if they're gonna offer him $15m for Die Hard 7 at this point.

Depp picked it up from Brando iirc.

I mean, if it's such a struggle for him, for whatever reason

Other factors aside, most of his current output is for the same producers, and apparently they will knock out 3 films at a time, with Willis going from set to set for his 2 days work on each. There have been glossy-magazine-type profiles about he and his current family moving in with Demi Moore a few years ago, so whatever else drives the decisions around his work, it seems nearly all of his time is spent in comfortable situations with faces he recognises.

Oh I'm not trying to disparage the guy, especially if he's suffering. Just struck me as an actor who had enough of a successful career that he could have probably pulled a Gene Hackman to just enjoy not working at all for awhile.

It seems probable that he's not making fully-informed decisions about his own career as a whole. Maybe the family are milking it while they can, maybe they're observing his desire to keep working by making it as low-impact as possible, like the business owner who keeps going in and sitting at the same office but is given fake documents to sign.