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Mon 14 September 2026 19:15, UK
When you think of Bruce Willis, the first thing that will always come to mind are his action movies, since that was the genre that he dominated during his peak years, becoming one of its biggest-ever icons.
Even if Die Hard was the only one he ever made, the actor would still be inextricably linked to the medium, because John McTiernan’s masterpiece has rarely been bettered. There can always be too much of a good thing, though, which convinced the star to change his ways in the late 1990s.
Not all of Willis’ action flicks were hits, and even fewer of them could hold a candle to his career-defining role as John McClane, but when he was constantly being offered so much money to headline them, it was difficult for him to say no, as everyone else would feel in the same situation.
By the end of the decade, he was in more danger than ever of becoming a one-note performer. After Pulp Fiction, he churned out Die Hard with a Vengeance, Last Man Standing, and The Jackal. The Fifth Element may have been a sci-fi picture, but he was still playing a Bruce Willis-type character, with Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys the only outlier of the bunch.
By the end of 1998, he knew something had to change, and a Razzie-winning performance in an underperforming and widely panned film will have that effect. “The last action picture I did was Mercury Rising,” he said that October. “After I saw that film, my brother turned to me and said, ‘Every action sequence in that movie was derivative of at least three films you’ve already done.’”
Suddenly, he had an epiphany. “A bell rang in my head,” Willis elaborated. “And I said, ‘I’ve got to do some movies without a gun in my hand.’” That’s what he did, and while the results were inconsistent, you can’t fault him for turning his back on familiarity in favour of at least trying something new.
Michael Bay’s sci-fi disaster epic, Armageddon, was the highest-grossing release of the year, the low-budget black comedy Breakfast of Champions was a shitshow, M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense was a monster, The Whole Nine Yards was a light-hearted caper, The Kid was a saccharine fantasy dramedy, Unbreakable deconstructed superheroes, Bandits was a road-tripping crime caper, and Hart’s War was a period-set war drama.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Not all of them worked, but the ones that did worked incredibly well, with those words of wisdom from Willis’ brother convincing him that it was time to stop going through the motions. It wasn’t a short-lived thing, either, with Antoine Fuqua’s 2003 title, Tears of the Sun, marking the star’s eventual return to action hero mode, and he’d been in nine films since Mercury Rising.
It wasn’t a permanent thing, obviously, but being called out by his nearest and dearest nonetheless convinced Willis that it was time to mix things up, broaden his horizons, and pivot as far away from the bread-and-butter of running and gunning as he could.
