Bruce Willis can still make mainstream movies

Bruce Willis' filmography has become so littered with straight-to-video crap over the past few years that one tends to forget there's a movie star hiding in there somewhere.

I didn't expect Eli Roth's Death Wish to be the movie that reminded me of his capabilities as an actor, but it was.

Probably in part because it's shot really well (by Rogier Stoffers), Death Wish has a sheen of mainstream credibility that has been missing from most other Willis films lately -- even though its release was pushed back, and never seemed like a good bet as a remake of some very grim (if successful) subject matter.

Here I guess I'm revealing my own biases, so maybe I should stop to explain.

I have never seen the original Death Wish or any of its sequels in its/their entirety. However, I have a very clear memory of being over at a friend's house and seeing some chunk of it -- maybe 35 minutes -- and being struck by how bleak and amoral it seemed. I was definitely too young to be watching it, and I probably missed the part of the movie in which Charles Bronson was still a nice guy and his family had not yet been killed. All I saw was the carnage he unleashed, with that stoic Bronson look that he'd just as soon shoot lowlifes as read the newspaper. In fact, these 35 minutes seeded in me a bias against Bronson that I haven't fully shaken to this day.

So when I heard that Willis was starring in a remake, it felt like a perfect fit -- which was a bad thing. Willis has developed a reputation for sleepwalking through his roles, which certainly contributes to the choices he's had to make. Just ask Kevin Smith what he thinks of Willis as a cooperative collaborator on set. The sleepiness of this era of his career seemed like a match for that stoic, amoral quality that I did not like in Bronson, and the movie carried just as little promise.

Well, Eli Roth was not interested in trudging through the grim sensibilities of a 1970s exploitation film updated to the 2010s. With a lively use of that camera, an energetic soundtrack (AC/DC makes an appearance) and a definite sense of humor to mingle with his love of gore, Roth makes this movie actually fun. What's more, he devotes enough time to Willis' descent from a law-abiding surgeon, husband and father who shrinks from a confrontation with another parent on the sidelines of a soccer game, to a vigilante who makes no distinction between the thugs who harmed his family and other thugs harming others in society.

But he couldn't do it without Willis. And though this is by no means Willis the joke cracker -- the guy who Moonlighting made famous -- that wouldn't be appropriate for this kind of movie anyway. Neither is it Willis the sleepwalker. Whatever he may do on the sets of other movies, he put effort into this one, taking evident care to get the emotions right. Whether he came to work on time and was nice to the other actors, I may not know, but the results appear on screen.

One wonders if it has something to do with the Roth-Tarantino connection. Quentin Tarantino produced a couple of Roth's movies, Roth made a short in Grindhouse and Roth appeared as an actor in Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino also of course cast Willis in Pulp Fiction, which was even sort of a comeback for the actor a full 24 years ago. I can see that being the reason Willis appeared in Death Wish, as a favor to Quentin, and he was therefore also on his best behavior. Whatever it was, it worked.

I should pause here to point out some obvious drawbacks of Death Wish. The film is verging on right-wing propaganda in certain parts with its attitude toward gun ownership and protecting yourself when the cops cannot. I don't think Eli Roth actually believes that, and the stores selling weapons, the people who work there, and the ease of getting those weapons are all treated with light parody here. Still, the movie reaches some pretty uncomplicated conclusions about the ultimate wisdom of arming yourself, and its overall mentality is closer than one would like to "shoot bad guys first, ask questions later." That said, as a critic I try to go with my own instinct of whether I enjoyed a movie or not without evaluating whether I fully agree with its politics, as I think a critic always should. On that score I did enjoy Death Wish, though I mightn't have as much if I thought it were actually Roth's intention to make right-wing propaganda.

If calling on old connections and past collaborators worked for Willis in Death Wish, it does give me hope for his next big role in Glass, a reprisal of his role in M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable. Shyamalan directs here as well. If we get Willis wide awake for this one, maybe we'll have a full Willis comeback on our hands.

Then again, that seemed possible back in 2012 with Looper, but it never happened.

I'm rooting for it, though. What I saw in Death Wish was enough to remind me of the movie star I miss, the movie star who's still in there and who is not yet too old to give us plenty more of what he did best.