Yippee-ki-yay! Bruce Willis’ best and worst

Bruce Willis might be our most underrated actor. To be certain, he doesn’t have anyone to blame but himself: he’s starred in some pretty horrible films.

But like John Wayne before him, Willis has come to define a certain archetype in American cinema. He’s the modern-day equivalent of a cowboy: a world-weary or morally comprised cop/private detective albeit one who, when push comes to shove, always does the right thing. He’s a hero — an anti-hero; a loner who can’t make his marriage work or is estranged from his kids.

Unlike the other bone-headed action stars of the 1980s (Stallone, Cruise, Schwarzenegger), Willis is able to imbue his characters with an everyman humanity that’s evident even in a popcorn flick like “Armageddon.” So here’s to Bruce Willis, an action hero with a heart, and, all things considered, an actor with some great films under his belt.

BEST FILMS

“Pulp Fiction” (1994)
Of this film’s cast, only Willis was a genuine star at the time, which lent “Pulp Fiction” some much-needed box office cred. And his character Butch Coolidge, an aging boxer who gets paid by a crime boss to throw his next fight, is the one good guy among the pimps, hit men, moles and lowlifes who populate the mind of Quentin Tarantino. He’s also the one guy you’re hoping survives this mess. Willis took the role and illustrated that there was more to him than just mindless action heroes delivering predictable one-liners. This film changed Hollywood, and although the credit usually goes to Tarantino (and rightfully so), Willis deserves some props too.

“The Sixth Sense” (1999)
Once again Willis took a chance and worked with a then-unknown young director, M. Night Shyamalan and made this horror classic. Here, Willis plays against type; his Dr. Malcolm Crowe is no gun-toting, one-liner spewing superhero. Instead, Willis turns in a nuanced and subtle portrayal of a child psychologist desperate to help a disturbed young boy who sees dead people — and a husband desperate to reconnect with his wife. His performance is less John Wayne (in “True Grit”) and more Gary Cooper (in “High Noon”).

“The Player” (1992)

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OK, so he only has one line in the film: “Traffic was a bitch.” That’s not the point. By 1992, Willis had already starred in two “Die Hard” films and the atrocious “The Last Boy Scout” and the impotent “Bonfire of the Vanities” (see below). He had become a poster-boy for Tinsel Town’s uber-commercial action movies. And yet, when director Robert Altman called him to play a parody of an action hero — running in to rescue Julia Roberts at the last moment in “The Player’s” film-within-a-film — he did it. Thus, ridiculing himself and the entire Hollywood system that had made him a multi-millionaire in the process. Let’s see Tom Cruise do that.

“Sin City” (2005)
An underrated masterpiece that’s actually a series of inter-related short stories, artfully woven together by directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino (a special guest director). However, at the emotional center of these blood-soaked tales is Willis’ character, Hartigan, and his father-daughter relationship with the stripper Nancy Callahan (played by Jessica Alba), who he saved from a rapist when she was a kid. Willis plays yet another world-weary anti-hero cop, this time with a bad heart that could give out at any time. “Sin City” is  ripe with video-game violence, but Willis’ redeems it with his character’s simple good-guy humanity.

“Die Hard” (1988)
This is not a great movie, despite the acclaim it has won, but it is considered one of the great Hollywood action films of all time. And the role of Officer John McClane, a wisecracking, street tough cop who single-handedly takes on a group of terrorists, has been the archetypal character that has defined Willis’ career — for better or worse. Of course, in our post-9/11 world, the terrorist plot at the heart of the film seems innocuous and dated: German terrorists seek to steal $640 million from a multi-nation corporation. Ah, those halcyon Cold War days when America was fighting terrorists who actually wanted to do something besides blow themselves — and others — up.

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