The Films of Bruce Willis

Neibaur (The Films of Judy Garland) and Schneederger (From Connery to Craig) offer an objective film-by-film assessment of the theatrical film career of Bruce Willis. One of the biggest movie stars of the 1990s and 2000s, Willis rarely won critical kudos and earned a negative on-set reputation. Despite audiences preferring him in action films—the Die Hard movies, for example—he consistently stretched his screen persona in films outside of that genre, including his all-out comic performance in Death Becomes Her. The book offers tantalizing behind-the-scenes tales of many turbulent film productions including (Bonfire of the Vanities, Color of Night, Cop Out, Striking Distance). This book only covers Willis’s theatrically released movies. Between 2015’s Rock the Kasbah and 2018’s Death Wish, he made seven straight-to-video films that are dismissed in a couple of sentences. The last film profiled fully is 2019’s Motherless Brooklyn. During the next two years, the actor appeared in 26 feature films before he announced his retirement from films due to frontotemporal dementia. The book also skips these direct-to-video quickies that accommodated Willis’s then-unknown illness by having him film all his scenes in one day or less.