Bruce Almighty – Weekend

The film Assassin’s Mission is released in Russia, a fantastic action movie where the characters fly in bathtubs and kill each other in sophisticated ways, however, it seems that the audience will be led to the cinema not by the fantasy of the scriptwriters, but by nostalgia: this tape is most likely the last in the career of the legendary Bruce Willis, who starred in low-key action films for several years in a row, and announced his retirement in March last year. Who was and remains for world cinema this actor, tells Vasily Stepanov.

A year ago, the family of Bruce Willis decided to publicly announce that the actor was ending his career due to illness – doctors, following aphasia, speech and memory disorders, diagnosed him with progressive frontotemporal dementia. The fact that Willis is not all right, the industry has known for a long time. The directors of films in which he has been filming non-stop for the past five years (only in the last two years 20 films with his participation have been released), after the family’s statement, they began vying to tell how they cut his lines in the scripts, and the whole action was necessarily filmed with understudies, because the choreography of the shootings is not so easy to remember even for a healthy person. Even the trailers of films that Willis starred in to finally satisfy his longing for his profession are difficult to watch today without pain. Not because these are such radically bad films (not at all, these are ordinary streaming productions, which were enough in the early filmography of our hero), but because you inevitably compare them with the films that made Willis a star – from Die Hard to “Pulp Fiction” – and those that gave him to demonstrate the range of his acting gift – from “The Sixth Sense” to “Kingdom of the Full Moon”.

Bruce Willis ended up as an action hero on the big screen thanks to a lucky coincidence. In 1987, when the offer of producers Larry Gordon and Joel Silver to shine in Die Hard was first rejected by Frank Sinatra (obviously, the image of a pensioner with a gun has overcome producer minds since ancient times), and then younger stars (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Richard Gere, Harrison Ford, Nick Nolte, Don Johnson, Mel Gibson), Bruce Willis was the last Boy Scout on the list, but actually he also refused at first – he had an unbreakable contract to shoot in the TV series “Moonlight Detective Agency” . And only the pregnancy of his partner in the legendary comedy show Cybill Shepherd and the three-month time-out she took in filming helped Willis climb to the top of the Nakatomi skyscraper and say the famous “Yippie kai-hey motherfucker!” Roy Rogers originally sang the song with the incomprehensible interjection “yippie kai-hey” in the old western The King of the Cowboys (1943). But the terrorist, played by Alan Rickman, called Detective McClain a cowboy so hard that he had no choice but to comply.

Willis skillfully fit into any circumstances. For years he was his own in a comedy, and in an action movie, and in a comic book, and in auteur cinema, he smiled as if awake – his main characters walked around the screen in a T-shirt – doing their job with laziness and jokes, even if the circumstances did not favor laughter. In the same “Die Hard” – McClain took off his shoes after the flight to rest and walk barefoot on a soft carpet, and then terrorists, shooting, broken glass! Oh well, it’ll work somehow. Perhaps Willis was taught to adapt by the very “Moonlight” – a series, largely conceived as a comedy homage to the noir era, but in five seasons managed to play Shakespeare and Orson Welles (he announced one of the series with a cigar in his hand), dived from a detective into pure sitcom and rosy-cheeked melodrama. Here the heroes wept, grimaced and joked stupidly, selflessly, impudently. Bruce Willis once served at the counter, from there the skill of punchlines; John Goodman once said that he was the funniest bartender in New York. Few people were surprised when, in the last year of its existence, after Die Hard, Moonlight Detective Agency suddenly turned into a cheeky, fourth-wall-breaking musical, and Willis put on diapers and sliders to portray a naive baby, just beginning to live, but already tired in the womb of Cybill Shepherd.

For the tired playfulness of his look and plasticity, he was always appreciated by the action-packed cinema. He played retired special agents long before the last wave of retired militants of the 2010s, in which all the action stars of the eighties took part in turn. His three-day stubble, bald patches and characteristic squint reported: goodness can be not only with fists, but also with some flaws. The downed pilots were his emblematic characters in Tony Scott’s The Last Boy Scout and Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element; boxer Butch in Pulp Fiction retired with a katana and someone else’s motorcycle; scary to say, but at the age of 42, Willis played a grouchy retired dad in Michael Bay’s Armageddon. Every Willis character was a loser in a good way: he loved but was divorced, wanted to change for the better but made stupid decisions, boasted a kind but sick heart, and ended up alone on an asteroid, watching how the world he saved flies to unimaginable happiness. Well, he is in a similar role today – and it’s too early to give up, while you can still say: “Yippie kay-hey, motherfucker!”

In theaters April 27

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