Sleepy Bruce Willis

I swear I'm not on some Bruce Willis kick, all evidence to the contrary. Yesterday I wrote about how I watched my second quarantine-themed Bruce Willis movie of quarantine, and one day later, I've already watched a third Willis flick. This one isn't quarantine-themed, unless you count one scene where a couple guys rob a store wearing half-masks that are basically surgical masks. That was the only possible connection to COVID-19 I could make.

In fact, I certainly wouldn't have watched Cop Out on Friday night if it weren't for a discovery I made the night before, shortly after finishing Surrogates. I can't remember what bit of internet research it was that led me to it, but I stumbled across the information that Willis acted in a stage version of Stephen King's Misery, which ran from late 2015 to early 2016. He played Paul Sheldon, of course. (What, did you think he played Annie Wilkes? That was Laurie Metcalf. Would have really liked to see this.)

I messaged the surprising information to a friend, another big Stephen King fan, and he responded that he didn't think Willis would have the chops for that. I countered that Willis does have the chops, he just doesn't usually use them. In this case he might, since he would obviously not have taken that role for a paycheck. In all other cases, at least lately, he tends to phone it in.

So Friday night, as proof of my theory, I decided to watch him phone it in.

I had heard awful things about Kevin Smith's movie -- both that it was bad, and why it was bad. The latter, at least, was according to Smith himself, who hasn't been shy about talking about how difficult Willis was to work with. I'm not googling his exact quotes now, but I think it was both an attitude issue and a preparedness issue. Like maybe Willis didn't want to be there, hadn't learned any of his lines, and was an asshole to everyone on set.

I was inclined to believe it, even as I also subtracted points from Smith for blaming the failure of a movie on one of the actors. For directors, in most cases, the buck should stop there. Or at the very least, accept the blame publicly even if you don't privately.

But in the ten years since Cop Out was released, I hadn't had occasion to see for myself how terrible Willis was in the movie, which would likely either confirm Smith's comments or render them as overblown blame-shifting.

The thing I remembered before watching was that I thought Willis looked "sleepy" on the poster. That was what I wrote in this post, a decade ago. It was a slightly different version of the poster than the one here, a version where he looks sleepier. I can't use the same one due to my long-standing rule of not using the same poster art twice for two posts on my blog -- even when they are separated by ten years. Anyway, that's why I'm invoking the adjective "sleepy" in the subject of this post, even if it comes a little closer than I'd like to Trump's lame characterization of Joe Biden as "Sleepy Joe."

Well, Willis may be sleepy in this movie, but I'd argue it's a lesser sin than other elements of Cop Out that are way too awake.

The worst scene in a very bad movie is not a Willis scene at all. He's in it, but he's on the other side of the glass of the interrogation room where Tracy Morgan is busy hamming his fool head off. Screenwriters Mark and Rob Cullen -- Smith can't take the blame for the script, at least -- apparently thought it was a good idea for a five-minute scene in which Morgan's character plays bad cop to a perp, roughing him up with lines he's gotten from movies. The joke is supposed to be that the lines start out as from cop-related movies, but devolve into famous quotes from any movie. It's actually a funny idea, but it goes on at least four times as long as it should, and Morgan doesn't sell it well. That could be because he's also wildly putting the perp in headlocks and pushing his head into the interrogation table while trying to deliver his lines.

Willis' responses, on the other side of the glass, are pretty sleepy, but they aren't what makes the scene so painful to watch.

This is just one example of the typical mode of Cop Out, an early tone setter. Willis is not good in it, and maybe he isn't as engaged as he should be, but his disinterest wouldn't have stood out to me if Smith hadn't called attention to it. There's no doubt the movie is quite bad. It's reasonable, I suppose, to conclude that Smith was so worn down having to cater to Willis' diva mentality that he had nothing left for the rest of the movie.

It occurs to me that Cop Out represented an interesting turning point for both men, in different directions. It's only a year after Surrogates, in which I thought Willis was quite good, and definitely engaged enough. After this, though, he started steadily sliding into where we find him now, selling his phoned-in performances for increasingly smaller paychecks on increasingly smaller movies. (The theory works better if you disregard Looper in 2012, in which he is again quite good.)

On the other hand, it's only a year before Red State, which is still the best directing Smith has ever done if you are considering both the performances of the actors and the overall craft of the film. I know most people don't like that film as much as I do -- it made my top 25 of last decade -- but I hope most people at least acknowledge that it is good by Smith's standards. You can see him having used the experience of Cop Out as motivation to be better. The win streak continued with Tusk before he came back down to earth again.

Well, one thing I can tell you for sure -- tonight will not be my third straight Willis movie.