Bruce Willis

  • Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

    Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) There’s something to be said for meaty plot-driven movies, and Motherless Brooklyn is the kind of endangered American studio film at the brink of extinction: smart, dense, definitely political (in the progressively engaged sense rather than the cheap-shot sense) a bit too long for its own good and yet remarkably rewarding if you’re willing to put in the time and attention. Written and directed by Edward Norton, it also features him in the lead role, as a private detective gifted with prodigious memory and analytical abilities but afflicted by Tourette’s syndrome. It’s a plum role for Norton, as the usual 1950s tropes are all slightly altered by his portrayal of a savant with social issues. Norton’s writing is crisp and his direction is transparent—but his acting calls attention to itself as we get inside an unusual mind. A rather good cast complements Motherless Brooklyn: Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays an activist with a secret unbeknownst to her; Alec Baldwin is ferocious as an influential city official, Willem Dafoe cleverly plays on his ragged image and Bruce Willis stuns in a rare good later-day performance in a short but pivotal role—for once, he’s not slumming on minimal effort, which I’m crediting to Norton as a director. The film is nominally based on a Jonatham Lethem novel I haven’t yet read, but even a cursory look at plot summaries shows clear differences between book and film: the film goes for neo-noir aesthetics by setting itself in 1950s New York (as opposed to the then-contemporary setting of the 1999 novel), and many subplots differ, all the way to the nature of the ending. Still, Motherless Brooklyn does have a comfortable heft to it: slightly too long for its own good, but still not a bad experience. I wouldn’t take away the scenes that talk about the importance of city planning, or the meditation on power, both municipal and personal (and how the same power can lead anyone to do public good and private bad.). Motherless Brooklyn is not a complete success, but I’ll take a few more of those movies rather than what the studios are churning out in an attempt to chase the summer tentpoles.

  • Once Upon a Time in Venice (2017)

    Once Upon a Time in Venice (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, June 2020) It pains me to be critical of Once Upon a Time in Venice—I still believe that Bruce Willis has at least one more great performance left in him, and he seems like a reasonable match for a crime comedy set against the eccentric characters of Venice, Los Angeles, during which our protagonist gets embroiled in escalating criminal enterprises as he seeks to get his dog back. There’s some promise here, in-between the sunny scenery (even when the film sticks to the lower-class of the neighbourhood) and the casting of both John Goodman and Jason Momoa. But there’s something about Once Upon a Time in Venice that feels off, a series of small mistakes and awkwardness that accumulate and keep making it worse. Willis looks significantly older than usual here, but he still can’t be bothered to do more than sleepwalk through his role like too many of his twenty-first century performances. Then there is the tone of the film, which reaches too self-consciously for wacky elements that fall flat because we’ve seen them far too many times in similar films (and maybe novels as well—if I was in a better mood, I would compare Once Upon a Time in Venice to Hiaasen or Westlake comic novels where dognapping is a common plot element, but this film doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those novels). The very small stakes don’t help either, and the result just feels like a combination of lazy and dull that doesn’t even manage a convincing sense of place. Even with low expectations, the film doesn’t quite satisfy—and we’re left waiting for Willis’ return to form.

  • Billy Bathgate (1991)

    Billy Bathgate (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) At first glance, Billy Bathgate looks like the kind of slam-dunk entertainment that 1990s Hollywood made so well—a mixture of coming-of-age drama set within a fascinating gangster context, with a little bit of romance to sweeten the whole thing. Throw in the 1930s period recreation, a bestselling source novel written by EL Doctorow, a strong cast of actors, plus story elements so familiar that they become comfortable, and Billy Bathgate looks like a ready-made audience pleaser and potential awards contender. Except that it didn’t turn out that way.  Production of the film was marred by endless rewrites, significant cost overruns and Doctorow distancing himself from the adaptation. Things didn’t get better upon the film’s release, as critics savaged it and audiences ran away. Now a largely forgotten relic of a decade now long past, Billy Bathgate has become a curiosity. It hasn’t improved with age—the blend of coming-of-age drama with gangster thrills is still awkward, and curious creative decisions keep haunting the film and making it duller than it should be. On the other hand, it does have some nice period detail, a fun episode set in a small upstate New York town, a rather amazing cast made of then-known names (Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, Bruce Willis) and people who would later become far more prominent (Stanley Tucci, Steve Buscemi), as well as far more nudity from Kidman than you would expect from the nature of the film. For film reviewers, it’s not a bad idea to go back in time to see not only the classics, but also the failures like Billy Bathgate. Decades past the media pile-up that often happens in such cases, it can be instructive to look at the wreckage and wonder—well, what happened here?

  • Blind Date (1987)

    Blind Date (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2020) Nearly everyone has a bad date story, but probably not something as hilariously awful as the one in Blind Date. Veteran comedy director Blake Edwards gets to play with Bruce Willis back when he was a good comedian, and a young Kim Basinger who simply looks terrific—and funny too. The film is about a blind date between two likable people—except that she gets out of control whenever she’s drunk, and he gets to pay the price for all sorts of bad decisions, losing almost everything along the way. Now, I wouldn’t want to get too enthusiastic about what’s an uneven comedy—there are clearly highlights and lowlights here. But anyone with an appreciation for broad comic acting, 1980s fashion and absurd physical comedy will get at least a few chuckles out of Blind Date.

  • Glass (2019)

    Glass (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) Movie reviewers have been saying for decades that you can never know what to expect from writer/direct M. Night Shyamalan, but that statement circa-2019 means something very different than what it did back in the early-2000s. It was about plot twists back then, but it’s about overall film quality right now: While Shyamalan’s work is now generally better than his 2002–2014 nosedive, his last few movies have been sharply uneven even within themselves, with his clever direction often fighting against his own exasperating writing. Glass is the latest case study—a disappointing third entry in a trilogy that should have been left as two disconnected first instalments. Here the main characters of Unbreakable and Split are brought together by shadowy operatives trying to prove that they’re mistaken about thinking of themselves as super-powered. The good news, I suppose, is that Shyamalan’s direction is usually effective, that Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson and James McAvoy deliver good performances, and that the first hour of the film has its moments even if it appears to be wasting everyone’s time by trying to prove that a superhero film isn’t about superheroes. By trying to ground itself in psychological thrills, Glass almost becomes a bore until it gets down to business. Then the last third of the film starts and viewers must buckle down for a climax that throws away three films’ worth of built-up credibility. Not only does Shyamalan make sure to double underline every belated clever idea he may have had about comic books (perhaps he hasn’t noticed that, in the meantime, nearly everyone in the entire moviegoing universe has become a comic-book expert), he squanders away a lot of goodwill (for instance by killing a major character by drowning him in a puddle) and concludes on a self-satisfied note that will feel jejune to many viewers. Glass does have a few good ideas, but the way it gets at them is either wasteful or ineffective. Sarah Paulson holds her own against the established actors of the series, but the biggest problem here is once again Shyamalan-the-writer undermining anything that Shyamalan-the-director can do. Frankly, Glass isn’t nearly as innovative as it thinks in bringing back superheroes in the real world through psychobabble, skepticism, and dull colours: there are several handfuls of other movies having attempted the same since Unbreakable, and often in a way that doesn’t have viewers feeling as if they’re the chumps.

  • Nobody’s Fool (1994)

    Nobody’s Fool (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) For an actor that was once so vital to American cinema, it’s surprising to realize after the fact that Paul Newman essentially retired in the nineties, with a total of five films during that decade: At the exception of Road to Perdition, his twenty-first century career was low-key—voice acting, TV movies, smaller roles, this kind of thing. So, it’s a bit of a surprise to discover Nobody’s Fool as one of his parting lead roles, a small-town character-driven drama focused entirely on his character. Newman’s filmography is not the only one being enhanced by Nobody’s Fool—he plays opposite a cross-generational ensemble cast that includes a prime-era Bruce Willis, one of Jessica Tandy’s last roles, as well as turns for Melanie Griffith (who hilariously flashes her breasts to Newman’s character) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (as a policeman, no less). Willis, in particular, is almost a revelation for those who have grown used to his increasingly detached screen persona—here he is playing a now-unfamiliar character—loose, funny and engaged. Still, the show belongs to Newman: In a revealing contrast to his earlier, sullen roles, the bad boy of Hud and The Prize and Cool Hand Luke has mellowed into an elderly actor playing an elderly man who has found contentment in a simple life. It does complement the small-town charm of the film, albeit one tempered by a depressing snowy atmosphere and the very down-to-earth portrait of flawed characters. There’s more nudity than you’d think from a “small-town intimate drama.”  Still, Nobody’s Fool remains a bit more interesting than expected—and not just as a lesser-known title on multiple filmographies.

  • Death Wish (2018)

    Death Wish (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Ho boy, do I have mixed feelings about this Death Wish remake. For one thing, I’ve been watching a lot of urban-decay movies of the early 1970s lately, including the original Charles Bronson film. For another, well, I’m Canadian—my nearest metropolitan area is in the midst of an unprecedented murder wave and yet our yearly total barely exceeds what the city of Chicago alone experiences over two weeks (although Chicago’s own wave of violence seems to be receding after a particularly bad 2016). Seeing Death Wish isn’t just like seeing a very American nightmare given form, but one that seems to be coming back from the past. You already know the story, or at least can grasp it in a few words: A peaceful man turns vigilante after a brutal attack leaves his wife dead and his daughter in a coma. The rest is pure predictable plot mechanics to complete the cycle of revenge, making sure our hero develops the skills, evades the cops, tracks down the responsible parties and executes them in a way that leaves him in the clear. The first step in such a by-the-number reactionary thriller is to clearly establish that its world is a far more dangerous place than ours—and the film does have to lie quite a bit in order to get there, reaching for racial stereotypes and vilifying its targets. Poachers attack a farm just to make a convenient point, statistics are grossly inflated, and a Greek chorus of radio and social media voices is there to half-heartedly make and dismiss objections. Meanwhile, Bruce Willis broods his way through a role very much in-line with much of his indifferent 21st-century screen persona. Director Eli Roth may want to make a social statement (although I doubt it—his horror-movie instincts come up whenever there’s even a faint chance to put gratuitous gore on-screen) but Death Wish is, far more than its predecessor, an NRA-approved exploitation picture designed to make fearful people feel comfortable in their twisted version of the world. It would be a pretty reprehensible picture if it wasn’t for one thing: It’s actually executed decently. Roth has the budget to go for clean impressive cinematography, feature good actors even in thankless roles (Dean Norris once more takes on a familiar persona, but he’s sufficiently good at it that emerges intact from the deplorable results), and flex his directorial skills honed on much nastier pictures. He doesn’t stray that far from his roots—plot-wise the film hinges on convenient coincidences and at least one ridiculous Rube-Goldberg contrivance. But Death Wish, for all of its considerable problems, does actually work at what it intends to be: a gun-powered revenge fantasy, slickly made and updated to the current era.

  • Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

    Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Third viewing, On DVD, April 2017) I first saw Die Hard with a Vengeance on opening day, and I’m pretty sure I saw it again on DVD ten or fifteen years ago. But I can’t find a mention of it on this site, so here we go: I really, really like the first two-third of this film. It open on the iconic “Summer in the City” soundtrack of a bustling mid-nineties Manhattan before starting to blow stuff up. Then it’s a wild ride through the city, accumulating brain-teasers, going through cheeky overdone action sequences and letting Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson do what they do best. John McTiernan’s direction is exceptionally good and there’s a sense of fun, joy and movement to the story. Every cinephile imprints on the movies of younger years, and mid-to-late nineties action cinema is the standard against which I will forever measure others. Die Hard With a Vengeance’s first two acts is good, solid, highly enjoyable moviemaking. I like it a lot, and I had forgotten just enough details about the movie to be charmed all over again. It’s also a beautiful wide-screen homage to New York City in its multiplicities of glories. Then … the film leaves Manhattan and loses quite a bit of steam. While the script is always big on coincidences, they get actively outrageous by the time our two main characters meet again upstate. By the time we’re on a boat, the film settles down to a far more conventional beat, and the tacked-on ending at the border feels more superfluous than anything else. Still, two-third of a great movie followed by a third of an okay one is better than the average. Contemporary viewers will notice that both Trump and Clinton are name-checked (the latter as a likely “forty third president”), and that a few moments eerily echo the events of 9/11.

  • Die Hard 2 (1990)

    Die Hard 2 (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Third viewing, On DVD, April 2017) I’m sure that I last saw Die Hard 2 roughly ten years ago, but since I can’t find trace of it in my online reviews, let’s have another go at it: A decent follow-up to the first movie, Die Hard 2 leaves the skyscraper for a snow-covered airport and reliably goes for big action sequences no matter their crazy justification. Bruce Willis stars as John MacClaine, a bit more super-powered than in the original but still recognizable as a reluctant everyman hero stuck in a bad situation. It still works pretty well, despite some rough special effects and occasional lulls: Director Renny Harlin was climbing at the top of his game back then, and the tension of the film is effectively handled. What I didn’t remember from previous viewing is how heavily saturated by eighties politics the script remains—the references to Irangate are barely camouflaged, and the film does carry a perceptible whiff of Reagan-era political concerns. But of course, the point are the action sequences, and Die Hard 2 does measure up decently as an action film. While not the enduring classic of its prequel, Die Hard 2 remains a good action movie … and it still lives up to expectations today.

  • Pulp Fiction (1994)

    Pulp Fiction (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, March 2017) The trouble with re-watching classics is the tension of judging whether it’s still a classic. I first saw Pulp Fiction, like every twentysomething at the time, in the mid-nineties on VHS—a good friend had brought it home and took delight in seeing me react to specific moments in the movie, whether it was the infamous watch speech or the “Garçon!” time-fixing moment. I filed away Pulp Fiction as a great movie and didn’t think about it. Now that I’m consciously re-watching big hits of the nineties, though, the question was: Did Pulp Fiction hold up, once past more than twenty years of imitators, Tarantino’s evolution and popularization of what (non-linear storytelling, witty dialogues, etc.) made it so special back then? What I clearly had forgotten about the movie was how long it was—at more than two hours and a half, the film is a daunting prospect, and the non-linear structure means that there’s almost an entire unexpected act added to a normal running time. Pulp Fiction, admittedly, doesn’t have the impact of surprise: Tarantino’s shtick is a known quantity by now, and seeing his characters go off on lengthy tangents isn’t surprising, nor seeing full sequences play in nearly real-time. The fractured chronology is still effective—I guarantee that even twenty years later, you will remember a lot of the film’s individual highlights … but not necessarily in which order they’re placed. I had near-verbatim recall of much of the John Travolta storyline, quite a bit of Bruce Willis’s segment (how could I forget the taxi driver, though?) but not much of Samuel L Jackson’s act. Fortunately, the dialogue still works, the dark comedy still feels solid, the cinematic flourishes (from “square” to the dance sequence to Harvey Keitel) still work very well and the movie still impresses by the mastery of its execution. It’s daring, sure, but it’s more importantly put together nearly flawlessly. Pulp Fiction has been endlessly imitated over the years, but it remains a solid best-of-class representation of its own subgenre. It’s well worth a revisit, especially if it’s been a while and yet you’re sure you remember most of it.

  • Precious Cargo (2016)

    Precious Cargo (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, July 2016) It’s been increasingly difficult not to notice that Bruce Willis shows up in a lot of straight-to-video movies lately. He usually shows up playing the chief bad guy, mumbles aimlessly for a few scenes, then is dispatched by the hero and goes back home to collect what I presume must be a substantial and much-needed paycheck. His performance in Precious Cargo is up to his newest standards. Fortunately, he’s only a small part of a film that focuses on a professional thief (Mark-Paul Gosselaar, wisecracking merrily) who gets recruited by an ex-lover (Claire Forlani, who seems to have belatedly gotten Angelina Jolie’s looks from non-natural means) to get herself out of some trouble. For a low-budget film (and the key to appreciating Precious Cargo is half in remembering the film’s limited means), Precious Cargo does a few things well: there are a few good action highlights (including a boat chase that looks as if it cost half the film’s budget), the characterization and wisecracking elevates the film from many other similar thrillers, and for all of its sins, it doesn’t try to be dour or downbeat. As the ending plays, everything is fine and thieves get their money. Roll the credits, don’t expect much more and the result is just good enough to warrant a viewing when you’re all out of other options. I’ve seen worse.

  • Death Becomes Her (1992)

    Death Becomes Her (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2016) I remember seeing bits and pieces of Death Becomes Her before (especially the special effects work) but not the entire thing and having watched it, I can only conclude that Hollywood’s become far more risk-averse in the past twenty-five years because … wow, this is a weird film. It blends comedy with a fair bit of understated horror, hops viewpoints between protagonists, plays with supernatural tropes and seems delighted in deglamorizing its stars. Seeing Bruce Willis play a downtrodden surgeon is remarkable not only because he’s relatively animated in the role, but because it’s the kind of self-deprecating role he’d never play any more. Goldie Hawn (occasionally in a fat suit) and Meryl Streep (gamely going to lowbrow physical comedy) also play against persona, carefully directed by Robert Zemeckis with the kind of silliness that seems absent from the last two decades of his work. What’s definitely within his filmography is the film’s use of special effects for storytelling purpose: While dated, the work still carries a certain charge even today, and it’s not a surprise to find out that it won the Special Effects Oscar back in 1993. Beyond effects, Death Becomes Her does have a bit of beauty/age thematic depth to it, although I probably would feel better about a clash between aging actresses had the script been better at portraying the female gaze: At times, the “ha-ha, they’re so vain!” gags can feel mean-spirited and missing the point of the theme. But it’s definitely a weird film, also so much so that it’s to be discovered and savoured. It takes chances, occasionally missteps and often dares to indulge in risk-taking humour. The result may not be entirely successful, but it’s gleefully audacious and remains its own creation, without giving the impression of being photocopied from the Hollywood mainstream. Worth a look, if only as a reminder of the kind of stuff that Hollywood won’t dare touch these days at it chases predictable results.

  • Vice (2015)

    Vice (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2016) Bad ideas never die, and that’s how Westworld’s basic concepts can be filed off and reborn decades later in a tepid low-budget thriller like Vice. Nominally about a theme park where clients can indulge in their wildest fantasies at the expense of the androids animated for their enjoyment, Vice clearly doesn’t know what to do with its own premise and quickly veers off in a dull stunted ennui. Bruce Willis briefly appears as the evil CEO, but (as in many of his low-budget efforts lately) seems bored by all aspects of the production. Thomas Jane and Ambyr Childers don’t really pick up the slack as, respectively, a dogged police officer and a robot who experiences flashes of her previous lives after being violently deactivated. For Science Fiction fans, Vice fails because it’s almost unbearably timid in the way it approaches its subject. Limited by budget and imagination, it barely scratches the surface of its possibilities—and the idea to transform its robots into likable victims quickly bogs down in clichés piled upon mawkishness. For action junkies, Vice doesn’t do much better: despite occasionally clever directing by Brian A. Miller, it seems uninteresting and then unendurable: it leaves no lasting impression and become undistinguishable from so many other cheap SF movies released straight-to-VOD. Let’s hope that Miller’s next film will be more ambitious and striking than Vice.

  • Mercury Rising (1998)

    Mercury Rising (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2015) I’ve been watching and enjoying so many late-nineties thrillers lately that I had begun to worry that I was losing my critical impartiality regarding the sub-genre.  Fortunately, here is Mercury Rising to remind me of what a bad movie of the form could be.  From a rather pedestrian premise (autistic kid solves problem that means that he’s cracked a top-secret encryption scheme; rogue elements of the government try to kill him; disgraced policeman steps in to protect him), Mercury Rising is primarily a failure of execution.  Bruce Willis shows little energy in his role (echoing a lack of interest in most of the movies he’s taken on since 2010), while Alec Baldwin cackles as the villain.  The plot is borderline nonsensical, the action scenes are rote and whatever emotional resonance the film tries to wring out of its elements rings false.  The ending sequence is particularly bad, unconvincingly built from disparate soundstage elements.  Mercury Rising is formula-built, which wouldn’t so bad if it was competently executed.  But it isn’t, and despite Baldwin’s enjoyable turn as the antagonist, there isn’t much here to stay entertained. 

  • A Good Day to Die Hard [Die Hard 5] (2013)

    A Good Day to Die Hard [Die Hard 5] (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2014) The Die Hard series has had its high and lows, but if everyone agrees that the first one was the best, then everyone will recognize that this fifth one is the worst. A joyless action film in which a bland action hero traipses through Russia while insulting the Russians and reminding everyone that he’s supposed to be on holidays, Die Hard 5 becomes the generic end-point of any distinctive series: a film that could have featured any other actors with any other character names. To be fair, Die Hard 5‘s problems are much bigger than simply ignoring the character of John McClane: Much of the blame should go to a dumb script, with the rest generously gift-wrapped by director John Moore’ incoherent action sequences. There are few words to describe how stupid a screenplay this is, marred with coincidences, generic situations, implausible choices and tortured plans far too complicated to be viable. Die Hard 5 seems to be stuck with only one helicopter as an action device, and seems to milk its presence well past the point of diminishing return. The action sequences can’t be bothered to spatially orient viewers, instead relying on copious shaking, dishwater-gray cinematography and blatant disregard for plausibility. The car chase around Moscow, which should have been a standout sequence in any other movie, is here shot in such an incomprehensible fashion that it becomes irritating less than midway through. While Die Hard 5 would have us believe into some good-old father/son rivalry, the result on-screen is more annoying than rewarding, and the CIA plot thread is never believable enough. What a waste, what a sad footnote to a good film franchise and what a disappointment for everyone involved. Bruce Willis, surely you knew better?