The real reason Bruce Willis was so frustrated with movies like Die Hard

When Bruce Willis became a TV star 40 years ago Through the hit ABC comedy series “Moonlighting,” No one in the entertainment industry thought he was ready to become the next great action hero. As private detective David Addison, he seemed poised to be an old-fashioned romantic comedy hero to Cary Grant, or at least, a scandalous successor to Paul Newman. However, he did not abandon the gun-toting passions of people like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger. So when he fell into an unimaginable trap $5 Million Payday for ‘Die Hard’ Star After every star in Hollywood gave up the role of John McClane, it seemed like a fool was looming on the horizon.

All Welles did with Die Hard was completely overhaul industry expectations for action films. Instead of being a muscled killing machine, he was an ordinary cop who used his intelligence as much as his facility used firearms to take down a gang of heavily armed robbers. Moviegoers were hooked on this new approach to action filmmaking, but the industry sought to replicate the look of “Die Hard” rather than its humanity. While clones like “Under Siege,” “Passenger 57” and “Speed” began to proliferate, Willis made a valiant return for two consecutive “Die Hard” sequels, and to keep his red meat-craving fans sated, he sought out the rawness and the rawness. Satirical musical compositions about MacLaine’s character. Some of these works were great (“The Last Boy Scout”), Some of it was “punching distance.”

Eventually, after more than a decade of daring, Willis took a break from the genre. What made him temporarily turn his back on the kinds of movies that made him a movie star?

In a 2005 interview with the BBC Relating to the release of Florent Serre’s underrated “Hostage,” Welles suggested that the iteration of the genre that had boosted his career was nothing more than the latest version of stories that storywriters had been spinning since the days of Homer. Per Willis:

“What we call action movies now are nothing more than what they used to call cowboy and Indian movies, then they called them gangster movies, then they called them World War II movies, Korean War movies, Vietnam movies, cops-and-robbers, they’re just stories about the triumph of good over… Evil. And look, this goes back to the Greeks and they were telling the same kind of stories and Shakespeare was telling those stories and Mel Gibson did the first “Lethal Weapon” and we both set models for the modern version of good guys versus bad guys. “The bad ones.”

I understand Willis’s overall point, but so do I no Certainly, Vietnam War films, for example, were about “the triumph of good over evil.” Anyway, what kept him away from cinema for a while? “Over the past 15 to 20 years, a lot of this kind of work has been done…it’s become obnoxious,” Willis said. “It was ‘Die Hard on a Plane,’ ‘Die Hard at the White House,’ ‘Die Hard at a Delicatessen,’ ‘Die Hard’ everywhere! I was just tired of it. I was tired of running down the street.” With a gun in my hand he says: “NOOOOO!”

While some viewed Hostage as a return to action heroism for Willis, he correctly believed it was more of a psychological thriller. The film has shades of “Die Hard” in that it takes place mostly in one place (home), but there is little in the way of silliness to go along with the violence depicted in the film. Unfortunately, when “Hostage” proved a commercial disappointment, Willis retreated to the safety of the “Die Hard” series and produced two less good sequels. Then came a wave of cheap straight-to-DVD shows that were frustratingly unbecoming of Welles’ talents. Sadly, his health condition deteriorated It forced his retirement, but his late career work would quickly be forgotten, while his many victories would be forever appreciated.