Why Does Bruce Willis Keep Making Films He Clearly Hates?

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a33660149/bruce-willis-movies-career-hard-kill-analysis-review/

He used to be the biggest action star in the world. But for the last decade he's appeared in a slew of VOD trash like Hard Kill that not even he wants to watch.

Bruce Willis has a new movie coming out today. It’s called Hard Kill in case you’re interested—although you’re probably not. And I’m sad to report that it’s every bit as generic as its title would lead you to believe.

The fact that an actor of Willis’ once-enviable drawing power is now routinely squandering his talent and hard-won box-office capital on instantly forgettable straight-to-VOD action-thrillers isn’t exactly news. His resume over the past decade is lousy with these sorts of films (see Extraction, Precious Cargo, and Marauders…or better yet, don’t). But it is a noteworthy come-down for a guy who once played John friggin’ McClane. And it also says something broader about the new calculus of the Streaming Age, where maturing action heroes who haven’t been lucky enough to snag a recurring role as an august S.H.I.E.L.D. agent or learned how to make peace with the fact that they’ve aged out of the very genre that once made them bankable A-list stars, are trying to figure out how to survive.

In case this is starting to sound like the wind-up for a heartless take-down of the 65-year-old Willis, believe me it’s not. I’m a serious fan dating back to the days of Moonlighting. And, just to be clear, he still does manage to pop up in a decent major-studio movie every once in a while, even if you have to go back to the 2012 one-two punch of Looper and Moonrise Kingdom to find one. Which is probably why I keep finding myself getting sucked back time and again to check out his below-the-radar VOD shoot ‘em ups. Hope springs eternal, and all that. It certainly hasn’t been out of professional duty, since so few of his interchangeable cheapies from the past decade have been considered significant enough to merit proper reviews. Think of this instead as an intervention.

But first let’s talk a little about Hard Kill. Like a lot of his recent VOD releases, Willis isn’t really the lead of the movie. In this case, that would be Jesse Metcalfe, who’s probably still best remembered for his role as the hunky lawn boy on Desperate Housewives. Still, Willis’ role is just sizable enough that it gives the film’s poverty-row distributor the legal justification to slap his globally recognized name and iconic mug on the film’s poster—even if it is the sort of marketing bait and switch that would make P.T. Barnum smile.

Willis plays a laconic former special ops soldier-turned-billionaire CEO named Donovan Chalmers whose MIT-educated, brainiac daughter (played by Lala Kent…yes, that Lala Kent from Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules) has created a potentially apocalyptic computer program called “Project 725”. This killer app was designed to help the world, but, like nuclear fission, it also holds the power to destroy it if it falls into the wrong hands. Which is exactly why an eccentric (but not nearly eccentric enough) terrorist named “The Pardoner” (Sergio Rizzuto, looking like a doughier Liev Schreiber) has kidnapped both her and her techno-gizmo. Willis’ desperate (but not nearly desperate enough) Chalmers hires Metcalfe and his decidedly uncharismatic band of GI Joe mercenaries to lure The Pardoner and his security goons to an abandoned warehouse, pick them off one by one, and get his daughter and her hard drive back.

Essentially a low-rent siege film minus any semblance of suspense, Hard Kill is distributed by a company called Vertical Entertainment. And if you haven’t heard of them, well, there’s really no reason why you should have. They released Tom Hardy’s recent Scarface-in-a-diaper fiasco Capone, but they’re still probably most notorious for being the folks who gave us John Travolta’s Gotti (which we’ll come back to in a moment).

Needless to say, they must have written Willis a very fat paycheck to be in Hard Kill because even if you squint really hard, it’s difficult to see what the actor responded to in the script. The action scenes are aggressively mediocre, the acting is wooden bordering on soporific, the villain’s only memorable trait is that he plays with a Rubik’s Cube, and the plot is so thin that if it were standing sideways it would be invisible. As for Willis, he spends half the film tied to a chair with not a whole hell of a lot to say. His emotional range runs from a smirk to a glare. It may also be worth noting that there are 22 different executive producers listed in the end credits. Twenty-two! Honestly, if I didn’t have to watch Hard Kill, I would have turned it off after 15 minutes.