The Bruce Willis performance that captivated Quentin Tarantino

When Bruce Willis went from being a TV star to motion picture in 1988 with “Die Hard” he seemed destined for a long run as a blue-collar rake the likes of which the movies had never seen. He had the incorrigibility of Cary Grant and the two-fisted ability of Gary Cooper, but he felt more accessible than either of them. Willis was not erudite and did not try to be. God no. His characters tended to be rough-and-tumble wiseguys with a moral compass that pointed to true north, men who made their mistakes and spent the length of the feature film redeeming them by hunting down evil men who sinned with impunity. He played well-meaning pranks that we could identify with and maybe look up to.

However, there was another Willis who I thought was even more amazing (I use the past tense because, after being with us a lot, he has sadly retired from acting). He was a real star actor. He wanted to step outside himself and play flawed men who found redemption without an MP5 machine gun. He wasn't above playing an abusive shithead (as Alan Rudolph did in Mortal Thoughts), nor was he afraid to take third billing as an alcoholic disgraced journalist at big-budget risks like Brian De Palma's Campfire. Willis wanted to stretch out, but parts and/or projects didn't always work out. In several cases, these were open falls. Fortunately, after taking it on the chin several times in a non-action role in the early 1990s, Quentin Tarantino gave him the wheelhouse part of Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction. As a pugilist driven by pride and analytical birthright, Willis was reckless perfection. You wouldn't think that at any point in Butch's underground odyssey, he would survive, but as we now know, in Tarantino's films, his men of the tough woods endure. They win.

A filmmaker as cocky as Tarantino might even rightly argue that Willis' portrayal of Butch was the star's finest hour on screen. But when asked by Sky Movies To name his favorite films between 1992 and 2009 (which included his filmmaking career at the time of the interview), Tarantino took a liking to Willis in an extremely unconventional superhero film.

If Bruce Willis didn't contractually owe Disney a movie as compensation the collapse of the unfinished “Broadway Brawler,” it's very possible that M. Night Shyamalan would never have had enough to make a film as sui generis as “Unbreakable”. But Willis, by signing up to play a dead man in The Sixth Sense (you've had so much time to see this movie, I don't want to hear it), helped Shyamalan earn the green light to make his story about a man who is the sole survivor of a massive train. discovers he is a superhero in a derailment.

In the aforementioned 2009 interview, Tarantino praised “Unbreakable” as “one of the masterpieces of our time.” He considered it a “brilliant retelling of the Superman mythology” and made sure to single out his former collaborator Willis as “terrific” as David Dunn, saying it was Willis' “best film performance he's ever given.” While I've always felt that Shyamalan curiously undercuts the film's central metaphor (that Dan's powers stem from his marriage, starting with the implication that he survives a train wreck only by wearing a wedding ring), Willis can't be argued with. majesty in this comic film with the partial aesthetics of a Tarkovsky film. We live for movies like this, and to see a star like Willis make them possible. He is so very long.