This year was shaping up to be another busy one for Bruce Willis: three films released already, with another eight in post-production. Willis has become an astonishingly prolific actor, wisecracking his way through direct-to-video genre releases and joining that elite band of 1980s and 1990s multiplex superstars (Nicolas Cage, John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone) whose box office capital had flatlined.
Willis’s recent reviews were uniformly negative. “Phoning it in” became a byword for his post-2012 career choices, after his last critically successful films, Looper and Moonrise Kingdom. Hard Kill (2020), Apex (2021) and A Day to Die (2022) will not live long in the cultural memory.
Willis’s recent decision to step away from acting after a diagnosis of aphasia – a language disorder caused by damage in the area of the brain controlling language expression and comprehension – brings his career to a cruel end.
