Bruce Willis’ performance that amazed Quentin Tarantino

When Bruce Willis jumped from TV stardom to… The movie hit in 1988 with “Die Hard” He seemed like he was destined for a long-term career as a blue-collar firebrand the likes of which you’ve never seen in movies before. He possessed 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 very knowledgeable nor was he trying to be. God no. His characters tended to be intelligent, volatile people with moral compasses pointing true north, men who had made their share of mistakes and spent the average length of a feature film making amends as they pursued bad men who had done wrong with impunity. He played bona fide games that we can recognize and perhaps look forward to.

However, there was another Willis, who I think was even more impressive (I use the past tense because, while he is still very much with us, he has sadly retired from acting). He was a real star actor. He wanted to step outside of himself and play flawed men who found redemption without an MP5 machine gun. He wasn’t good at playing abusive scumbags (as he did in Alan Rudolph’s Deadly Thoughts), and he wasn’t afraid to accept third billing as the alcoholic disgrace of a journalist in a big-budget risk like “The Fire of Vanity” by Brian De Palma. Willis wanted to expand, but the parts and/or projects didn’t always work out. In many cases, they were completely floundering. Fortunately, after attacking his chin several times in non-action roles during the early 1990s, Quentin Tarantino gave him the wheelhouse role of Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction. As a boxer driven by pride and birthright, Willis was a brash idealist. At any point during Butch’s underworld odyssey you don’t think he’ll survive, but, as we now know, tough guys like him stick around in Tarantino movies. They won.

An arrogant filmmaker like Tarantino might be responsible, even right, in claiming that Welles’s 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, at the time of the interview, included his filmmaking career), Tarantino went to Welles for a wildly unconventional superhero film.

If only Bruce Willis didn’t contractually owe Disney a movie as compensation The unfinished play “Broadway Prowler” is unraveled. It’s very possible that M. Night Shyamalan didn’t have enough clout to make a movie as unique as “Unbreakable.” But Willis, after signing on to play a dead man in The Sixth Sense (you’ve had plenty of time to watch that movie, I don’t want to hear that), helped Shyamalan get the green light to tell his story of a man as the sole survivor of a massive train derailment. Along the way, he discovers that he is a superhero.

In the 2009 interview mentioned above, Tarantino praised Unbreakable as “one of the masterpieces of our time.” He found it “a brilliant retelling of the Superman mythology”, and made sure to single out his former sidekick Willis as “terrific” in the role of David Dunn, saying it was “the best performance Willis has ever done in a film”. Although I’ve always felt that Shyamalan strangely trivializes the film’s central trope (that Dan’s powers derive from his marriage, starting with the implication that he only survives the train wreck by putting his wedding ring back on), there’s no arguing with Willis that The grandeur of this comic book movie with the partial aesthetic of a Tarkovsky film. We live for movies like this, and seeing a star like Willis makes it possible. He missed a lot.