It’s hard to fully express what movies have lost with the retirement of Bruce Willis. When his family announced in February that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of dementia, the scope of his expansive career was pulled into sharp focus.

But then not many stars follow the path he took, either in his unusual route to stardom or his unwillingness to rely only on the traits that made him famous to keep that stardom sustained. Willis was essentially unknown outside of those paying attention to Off Broadway (and Off Off Broadway) theater productions when producer Glenn Gordon Caron cast him opposite Cybill Shepherd in the breezy mystery series Moonlighting.

The almost-30-year-old actor (with a hairline that made him look older) easily slipped into the shoes of David Addison, a roguish, wisecracking, blue-collar private eye with a twinkle in his eye who never seemed to be taking anything seriously but did the right thing when the moment called for it (especially if the moment called for muscle).

It also made it hard to figure out where Addison ended and Willis began. That’s partly because the Willis who made talk-show appearances, appeared in wine-cooler ads, and branched out into music with the album and HBO mockumentary The Return of Bruno, appeared so similar to his star-making role.

But it’s mostly because Willis, even at this early point in his career, understood what he brought to the screen and what he could naturally do well. Willis’s film career — launched while Moonlighting was still in production — has been less a matter of chameleonic reinvention than of pushing that persona in new directions.

Sometimes it’s meant leaning into goofiness or playing against type with a wink. As Willis’s career progressed, some of the mischievousness evaporated as he found himself more frequently playing characters overwhelmed by melancholy.

Not every film worked but, taken as a whole, Willis’s filmography suggests an actor with a savvy sense of his own abilities who frequently looked for challenges that stretched those abilities without breaking them. The final stretch of Willis’s career is defined by a string of low-budget, quickly made direct-to-video roles, seemingly the efforts of a man attempting to work as much as possible while he still could.

(The list also largely skips Willis’s voiceover work, apart from a pair of talking baby movies.). This is also a list tightly focused on Willis and what he brings to the movies and thus its rankings are weighted in favor of films in which he stars.

Willis’s cameo gives Robert Altman’s The Player a terrific punch line, but it’s decidedly not a Bruce Willis movie.) It’s a career with undeniable lows but also remarkable highs in which it’s impossible to imagine anyone else playing Willis’s part. That’s what makes a star a star.

Like other marquee actors of the ’80s and ’90s, Willis struggled to find his place in the changing movie landscape of the 2000s, often making movies that vainly tried to repeat past successes. Willis’s ability to anchor action movies is undeniable, but even he can’t turn a bad film into a good one.

Willis effectively conveys Talley’s pain in the film’s early scenes, but the film quickly devolves into an assaultive, suspense-free headache. 67.

Willis is fine in an unchallenging role. 66.

From Willis’s tough-guy performance to the double-crosses, you’ve seen all of this done better elsewhere. 65.

At this point, everything that made McClane and the Die Hard series distinctive has fallen away. Once an in-over-his-head everyman, McClane’s now just another generic gun-toting hero stuck in an underachieving film.

A one-joke comedy that nonetheless inspired two sequels and a TV spinoff, Look Who’s Talking stars Kirstie Alley as a single mom named Mollie, John Travolta as a New York cabbie named James, and Bruce Willis as the voice of Mikey, Mollie’s kid, whose inner monologue frequently misunderstands the world around him.

Willis returned in the just-as-bad sequel co-starring Roseanne Barr as the voice of his sister, but neither showed up for Look Who’s Talking Now in 1993. their characters having grown too old for cutesy observation, that role fell to James and Mollie’s pets.

Tracy Morgan scores the only laughs in this Kevin Smith-directed buddy cop comedy. Willis never gets above cruising speed as Morgan’s long-suffering partner, and no chemistry ever develops between the two as the story plods along from incident to incident until the film eventually ends.

Willis is all over Rob Reiner’s disastrous foray into grating whimsy, serving as narrator and making periodic appearances as a string of (maybe) lookalike characters who guide the eponymous hero (Elijah Wood) on his global search for new parents. The film’s a mess, but its problems can’t really be laid at Willis’s feet (as oversize as they are in the scenes where he’s playing a shopping mall Easter Bunny).

It’s hard to say who’s more miscast in this loose remake of The Day of the Jackal: Richard Gere doing a not-so-impressive Irish accent as an IRA operative sprung from prison or Bruce Willis as the international assassin and master of disguise Gere’s tasked with taking down. Gere might have the edge, but at least he doesn’t have to wear any silly wigs.

Still, while there are far more versatile performers than Willis, there’s a lot to be said for knowing what you do best and sticking with it. That’s led to a filmography whose best films have used him well and whose worst seldom seem like Willis’s fault.

It’s a pattern that’s been in place since the early days of his film career, like his work as a flashy, duplicitous mob lieutenant to Dutch Schulz (Dustin Hoffman) in this mostly sleepy adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s 1989 novel.

The problems with the film lie elsewhere. 58.

The Die Hard franchise aside — and even there only up to a point — Willis hasn’t had a lot of luck with sequels. His follow-ups to Red, Sin City, and The Whole Nine Yards all struggle, and fail, to re-create what made the first entries successful.

He’s a literally spectral presence in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City sequel, mostly watching the action from the sidelines of the Great Beyond. He’s game as a hit man in the middle of an identity crisis in The Whole Ten Yards, but that doesn’t make the film any less irritating.

All suggest Willis could have found better things to do with his time. 55.

Willis had been a singer and a harmonica player before he became famous and in 1987 released the album Return of Bruno on Motown. Dominated by covers of classic soul songs, it’s unextraordinary, but Willis’s love of the music was hard to mistake and the presence of legends like Booker T.

The Return of Bruno presents a Spinal Tap–inspired account of Bruno Radolini’s career, from his early days as a New Jersey bar-band legend to his appearance at Woodstock to his stint in Detroit as a musician and used car salesman (complete with appearances from Ringo Starr, Elton John, Joan Baez, and others effusively praising Bruno and discussing his important place in music history) before ending with 30 minutes of concert footage in which Willis appears to be having the time of his life.

Willis makes just a quick cameo in this overcranked sequel to the hit spy comedy. It’s notable mostly for two reasons: It reunites.

Science fiction offers up so many realms to explore. So many ideas.

It’s a topic we can only theorize about but it’s one that has ushered in some of the best sci-fi movies of all time. Ones that expand the boundaries of imagination and, often, chase us down some very cool rabbit holes.

Here are the top 15 time travel and time loop movies of all time.

Palm Springs features the headlining duo as strangers who attend a wedding out in the California desert and get stuck in a day they can’t escape. It’s a funky and fresh spin on the format featuring two characters who run the gamut of emotions and experiences involved with being able to live forever, but never being able to move forward in time.

Simmons co-stars. Check out IGN’s review of Palm Springs.

Ethan Hawke joins Succession’s Sarah Snook and Preacher’s Noah Taylor in this mind-bending thriller movie from The Spierig Brothers (Daybreakers, Jigsaw. It’s about a temporal agent (Hawke) who embarks on a final time-traveling assignment to prevent an elusive criminal from launching an attack that kills thousands of people.

Check out IGN’s review of Predestination. Where to Watch: Stream on Pluto TV (with ads), rentable on Amazon and most platforms.

As the young Joe, Gordon-Levitt is a mob assassin who kills victims that get sent back in time for him to dispose of while Willis’ Joe is old Joe, who, fulfilling a “Looper” contract, is supposed to be sent back and killed by his younger self. But old Joe, upon his arrival in the past, has other things in mind – namely stopping the future from being destroyed by an entity known only as The Rainmaker.

Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, and Paul Dano also star. Check out IGN’s review of Looper.

Happy Death Day takes the “time loop” concept and wickedly infuses into slasher horror movie as Jessica Rothe’s Tree finds herself being killed over and over again by the same masked maniac. Once realizing she only has a few “deaths” left in her, she takes matters into her own hands and tries to figure out who’s behind the mask.

Check out IGN’s review of Happy Death Day. Where to Watch: Stream on FX Now, rent on Amazon and most platforms.

Wells’ landmark 1865 novella tells the time-honored tale of a Victorian-era inventor, here actually named H. George Wells (and played by Rod Taylor), who uses a machine of his own design to travel to the far-off future, discovering that humanity is now become two new species – the enlightened Eloi and the monstrous, underground-dwelling Morlocks.

Where to Watch: Rent on Amazon and most platforms. Sleeper hit Source Code, from Moon’s Duncan Jones, unspools a unique spin on “time loop,” following a U.S.

It’s a clever, devious mystery that also stars Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright.

Where to Watch: Stream on Max or rent on Amazon and most platforms. Time After Time’s bonkers hook — that being Malcolm McDowell’s H.G.

This playfulness with both sci-fi and real history forms a fun, irresistible yarn that has to be seen to be believed. Wrath of Khan’s Nicholas Meyer directs while Mary Steenburgen co-stars.

This entry is a bit of a cheat since we’re also lumping T2: Judgment Day into the mix. Hey, same continuing story, same director.

uprising). Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 and Michael Biehn’s frazzled future freedom fighter use our present era (okay, 1984) like a battleground in this sci-fi firestorm.

Where to Watch: Max, or rentable on Amazon and most platforms. Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams star in this delightful time-tinkering rom-com from Love, Actually’s Richard Curtis, as Gleeson plays a young man with the ability to time travel who tries to change his past over and over in order to improve his life, and also win the girl of his dreams.

Where to Watch: Rentable on Amazon and most platforms. The “time loop” concept went big with alien apocalypse flick Edge of Tomorrow (confused so much with the film’s tagline “Live, Die Repeat” that Blu-ray box art waaaay emphasized the latter).

& Mrs. Smith’s Doug Liman directs this terrific Tom Cruise vehicle, about humanity losing war against an invading alien army that always seems to be several steps ahead.

Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star in this keenly-crafted, funny alien actioner.

Where to Watch: Max, or rentable on Amazon and most platforms. Two teenage metalheads from San Dimas, California recklessly, and hilariously, mosh through time, collecting (okay, mostly kidnapping) famous historical figures from in order to ace a crucial test in one of the most entertaining movies from the ’80s, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter embodied these dense-but-sweet wannabe rockers to a “T,” fast forming an iconic comedy duo. Check out our guide to the best Keanu Reeves movies of all time for more.

Shoestring budget indie film, Primer, which acts as a no-frills psychological thought experiment about the accidental discovery of time travel, is one of the most cerebral takes on temporal tampering ever. It’s a stimulating, challenging chronicle of two engineers who dabble in time travel, testing its limits, only to discover the awful ramifications and consequences of fourth-dimensional meddling.

Check out IGN’s review of Primer. Where to Watch: Rentable on Amazon and most platforms.

Mercilessly funny and surprisingly endearing, Groundghog Day pushed the format in new directions. All of this is accentuated by Bill Murray’s exceptional performance as a shallow TV weatherman, Phil Connors, who gets stuck in a repeating February 2nd nightmare with no true explanation (other than perhaps the universe forcing him to become a better human).

Where to Watch: Netflix, or rentable on Amazon and most platforms. Director Terry Gilliam’s insane, lavish visuals stuck mainstream pay dirt with the inventive, star-studded 12 Monkeys (which also became a pretty great TV series 20 years later, by the way).

“Science ain’t an exact science” Willis’ Cole is told as he clumsily, and harshly, arrives in both the right and wrong times, piecing together the puzzle, thinking the disease may have begun as the brainchild of a mental patient (Pitt) from a wealthy family. 12 Monkeys is freaky, funky, and full of surprises.

Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future is not only considered one of the best front-to-back movies of all time but it laid the groundwork for time travel in a way that’s influenced just about every sci-fi property since. And yes, we’re cheating here again, like we did with Terminator, and also including the film’s two sequels in this entry too (same story, same director.

All the ingredients came together in all the right ways for this pivotal pop-culture milestone, tracking young Marty McFly’s adventures through time as he tries to set things right for himself and his family (lest he and his siblings wind up erased or his own future kids wind up delinquents). Michael J.

So I guess if this year’s sci-fi action tickler Looper has taught us anything, it’s that no actor is as well-equipped to go back in time and talk to some dummies about life as Bruce Willis. (I mean, it also taught us that all women should be sexy moms, but everything teaches us that.

But let’s be honest. Something about those piercing green eyes and weary yet earnest jaw-clenching just inspires trust in those he’s come back to warn.

Bruce Willis wants you to experience the adoption of your new puppy with all the flush of wonderful surprise…before he tells you there’s only six days left before the deadly Dog-Zombie Outbreak.). But really, even though this is his third time-travel movie, it doesn’t feel like ENOUGH.

Somebody has to go back in time and warn them before it’s too late. And Bruce is up to the job.

Prometheus. Bruce Willis appears, grizzled and unannounced, at the Weyland Corporation’s annual Unidentified Destination Signup Career Festival and Bake-Off to have a serious sit-down with a crack team of biologists, geologists, and medical professionals hovering around the Operation Hushpants booth.

“Maybe consider not on this weird mission if they won’t even offer to tell you about its purpose until after you’re out of stasis orbiting a planet whose location you don’t even know,” he suggests, quietly and earnestly. “Maybe just find any other job in the entire world instead.

Except you,” pointing to the geologist, “you’re useless.”. And so, lives are saved, except Fifield, who still grumblingly goes aboard the alien ship with the most precise location technology the future can buy, and gets lost in a two-way tunnel.

Signs. “THEY’RE AFRAID OF WATER, I’M FROM THE FUTURE,” Bruce Willis shouts as he appears in the cellar amid the rattling thumping terror of the alien invaders.

“ARE YOU SURE,” calls Joaquin, “I MEAN, I BELIEVE YOU’RE FROM THE FUTURE, WHY NOT, I JUST DON’T GET WHY THEY’D BE INVADING A PLANET THAT’S 70 PERCENT WATER, THEN.”.

My Dinner with Andre. Bruce Willis shows up during appetizers to tell Wally that, forty years from that very night, he’ll die of heart failure in his sleep.

“I agree,” says Bruce. “Plus, by then, you won’t even be living in New York.”.

Bruce spends the evening chatting with the two friends, an evening of soul-searching and the state of the world. Before going back to the future, Bruce Willis visits himself as a child and tells himself to befriend Wally twenty years in the future so he can be at Wally’s deathbed, forty years from now, and travel back to tonight to seal the bond of friendship.

Lord of the Rings. “Your uncle has a magic ring,” says Bruce Willis, sliding into a seat across from Frodo in a booth of the Hobbiton pub.

It has to be destroyed, and if you try to do it it will just be a huge mess everywhere. I’m here to destroy it for you.”.

“I hate you.”. Bruce, realizing Frodo is totally shitfaced and also pulling a Joseph Gordon-Levitt when that is totally uncalled for, decides to cut his losses, and gets up to head for a real party city like Rivendell.

Kingdom of Heaven. Wait, no, scratch this one.

There’s nothing Bruce could have done. Stand down, Willis.

Obviously this is just a small selection of the places where he can do good – the world is full of movies just begging for Bruce Willis to sit some people down and explain their bad choices to them. Hopefully the success of Looper will mean some sequel potential, and Bruce Willis will suit up to once again make the one-way trip back in time and try to save some dummies from themselves.

It must say something, surely, about humans, how often time-travel movies are about returning to the past rather than jumping to the future. As Mark Duplass’s forlorn character says in Safety Not Guaranteed, “The mission has to do with regret.” With all the potential to explore the unknown world of the future, so often when our minds conspire to bend the rules of time it’s instead to rehash the old.

So absent is the future from the canon, in fact, that when it is involved, typically future dwellers are leaving their own time to come back to the present. Back to the Future Part II aside, it seems as if there’s something about going forward in time that just doesn’t track for humans.

In any case, the time-travel stories deemed worthy of Hollywood budgets aren’t always straightforward in their mechanics. Some films on this list barely qualify as time-travel movies at all.

There are movies about trips through time but also ones about the bending and fracturing and muddying thereof. then there are those about, as Andy Samberg aptly puts it in Palm Springs, “one of those infinite time-loop situations you might have heard about.” There’s even a movie in which we get only 13 seconds’ worth of time travel, when it functions more like a joke whose punch line hits at the film’s climax.

That being said, the list leaves out movies in larger, more extended franchises in which time meddling is a one-off dalliance thrown into a sequel with little by way of foreshadowing: think Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Avengers: Endgame, and Men in Black III.

and that try to succeed at it in new and interesting ways. So let’s get to it.

Some compelling reasons argue that it doesn’t: Time travel isn’t a major factor in the plot, and the time traveling that does occur is, yes, only a 13-second jump. But its use of time travel is meaningful insofar as the movie itself is a loving spoof of Star Trek, which makes use of time travel in three films (one of which made this list), not to mention dozens of episodes across its various TV iterations.

Galaxy Quest is available to rent on Amazon. Pick away at the surface of a time-loop movie and you find a horror movie.

(It’s also quite funny.) Reliving the same day over and over is an unimaginably potent form of psychological torture, and adding murder to the equation does little to dull that edge. The film follows a college-age protagonist struggling to escape from a masked slasher hell-bent on killing her again and again while she tries to solve the mystery of how she got stuck in a time loop.

Seriously, this may be the only good movie in which the film’s whole focus is using a time machine to travel into the future. The fact that it’s a sequel is telling — the characters already traveled into the past in the first movie, and the filmmakers decided to save “traveling even further into the past“ for the third film in the trilogy.

Back to the Future Part II is available to rent on Amazon. It’s a dirty little secret of time-travel movies that they tend to be, well, pretty white.

Produced by Spike Lee and featuring one of filmdom’s most famous time travelers in a cameo role, it follows a Black teenage science prodigy who uses a time machine to try to save her brother from being killed by a police officer. See You Yesterday is streaming on Netflix.

It’s a concept that feels distinctly of a different era, so pure is its zaniness, that it’s hard to imagine anyone concocting it today. The titular duo, Californian high-school students in the ’80s, travel through the past looking for historical figures in order to ace a history project, then bring them all back to the present.

We get Genghis Khan in a sporting-goods store and Mozart on an electric keyboard. What more could you want.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is streaming on HBO Max. Time-travel-film aficionados know this won’t be Jake Gyllenhaal’s only stop on this list, but no matter.

For some reason, a romantic subplot is shoehorned into this, along with a bunch of frankly unnecessary technical mumbo-jumbo, but the core idea is a compelling mix of the time-loop movie and the train whodunit that Gyllenhaal is a perfect fit for. Source Code is available to rent on Amazon.

Thank God La Jetée was adapted into something that can stand on its own feet artistically. 12 Monkeys may not retain its source material’s black-and-white look or stripped-down, static-image presentation, but it is a rollicking good time nonetheless.

Which, like at least one other movie on this list, “speaks to the present moment,” or whatever. 12 Monkeys is available to rent on Amazon.

Rather, it’s a sort of de facto time-loop scenario in which the protagonist tries repeatedly to pay a ransom to save her boyfriend’s life. In fact, if not for a few key details, it could easily be characterized (and often has been) as an alternate-endings movie rather than a time-travel film.

Run Lola Run is available to rent on Amazon. One of the most striking things about Groundhog Day is the mutability and replicability of its core conceit.

Repeat. after its original tagline.

A noncombatant thrust into a war against invading aliens, Cruise’s character finds himself reliving day one of combat over and over, slowly but surely refining his techniques in order to survive the extraterrestrial onslaught.

If you could create some sort of an advanced stat to measure controversy generated per unit of interesting filmmaking decisions, J.J. Abrams would have to be near the top in terms of his ability to rig up movie drama from almost nothing.

Star Trek may be his best film, though, a sure-footed reinvention of a dorky sci-fi franchise that made it, well, cool. Somehow, the beauty of Spock and Kirk’s bromance being woven through chance encounters with future selves kind of … works.

Star Trek is available to rent on Amazon. There’s a relative dearth of time travel in animated film, which perhaps is a function simply of the fact that it’s less impressive to stage in a world that’s already unreal.

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Last Man Standing is a 1996 American action film written and directed by Walter Hill and starring Bruce Willis, Christopher Walken, and Bruce Dern. It is a credited remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

In Prohibition-era Texas, a wanderer named John Smith (Bruce Willis) drives his Ford Model A Coupe into the small bordertown of Jericho. As he arrives, a young woman named Felina (Karina Lombard) crosses the street, catching Smith’s eye.

They warn him against staring at “Doyle’s property” and smash up his car.

the cowardly Galt refuses to help him. Instead, Smith walks to the town hotel, run by Joe Monday (William Sanderson), gets a drink and a room, and takes two M1911 pistols out of his luggage.

Smith departs and returns to the hotel, much to the surprise of Jericho’s residents.

Strozzi is eager to wipe out his rivals and is spending heavily to recruit anyone who can fight into his gang. Smith agrees to his offer and meets Giorgio Carmonte (Michael Imperioli), son of a prominent Chicago mobster who is monitoring Strozzi’s activities in Jericho.

Smith accompanies Strozzi and his men to the backcountry, where they meet Ramirez, a corrupt Mexican police lieutenant on Doyle’s payroll. The gang ambushes Doyle’s men and seizes a caravan of illicit foreign liquor.

Smith defects to Doyle’s side and reveals Ramirez’s betrayal. Hickey travels to Mexico, kills Ramirez and a corrupt Border Patrol officer involved in the liquor trade, and kidnaps Carmonte.

Strozzi in turn kidnaps Felina and offers to trade her instead. The two gangs make the exchange and return to their respective empires.

Smith is apprehended by Sheriff Galt, who brings him to meet with Captain Tom Pickett (Ken Jenkins) of the Texas Rangers. Pickett has been ordered to investigate the dead Border Patrol officer’s death and warns Smith that the State of Texas will not tolerate Doyle and Strozzi’s war any longer.

As Smith leaves, Pickett warns him that if he finds him there after ten days, he’ll kill him as well.

Smith gives her some money and gets her a ride out of town. The next day, Smith relays a false rumor that Strozzi is preparing to bring in more men.

Smith kills the men guarding Felina and gives her one of Doyle’s cars to escape. The next day, Smith is waiting at the safehouse when Doyle arrives, and claims that he arrived too late to keep Strozzi from kidnapping Felina.

Call), believes Smith’s story but Hickey does not. Doyle goes berserk and declares that he will wipe out Strozzi’s gang later that day.

Smith’s plan goes awry when Hickey ambushes him, having received word that Felina was spotted heading towards Mexico. Doyle imprisons Smith and has him tortured, demanding to know where Felina is.

Later that night, he overpowers his guards and escapes with Monday and Sheriff Galt. As they are driving out of town, they see Hickey and his men slaughtering Strozzi’s gang at a roadhouse.

Smith takes refuge at a remote church where Felina went to pray. Two days later, Sheriff Galt arrives and informs Smith that Monday was caught smuggling food and water to the church and that Doyle will probably torture him to death.

Smith returns to town, kills McCool and the rest of Doyle’s men, and rescues Monday. Doyle and Hickey are absent, having gone down to Mexico in a desperate search for Felina.

Hickey pretends to surrender and tries to kill Smith, who outdraws and shoots him dead.

Walter Hill was approached by producer Arthur Sarkassian to remake the Japanese film Yojimbo (1961), which Akira Kurosawa not only directed but also co-wrote with Ryūzō Kikushima. Hill says, “It took me a long time to be persuaded to do it.

Kurosawa was insanity for the obvious reasons. The first movie was very, very good and in addition I would be in the long shadow of Mr.

When he learned that Kurosawa was supportive of an American remake, Hill agreed to write and direct—but on the condition that the film not be a Western (there had already been an unauthorized European remake, the Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, which had been the subject of litigation). He decided to do it as a 1930s gangster film using techniques of 1940s film noir.

“This is the story of a bad man, who as soon as he arrives begins pushing buttons and doing things only for himself”, said Hill. “But we also discover that this man is at a point of spiritual crisis with himself and his own past.

The action and the violence must be organic to the story being told. I think this is obviously by its nature a very dark and very hard movie, so I think it would be dishonest to tell the story and present the physicality in a softer way.

There’s actually very little blood other than in the sequence where Bruce gets beaten up.”. He admitted the film was not realistic.

“We’re into a ‘once upon a time’ mythic-poetic situation.”. Hill signed to make the project in 1994.

The film was known by several titles including Gundown, then Gangster, then “Welcome to Jericho.”. Hill later said that he and Bruce Willis “were not close when we did the film” but “I liked working with him.

Classic, ‘I know what you mean. You want me to be a Bogart, Mitchum kind of guy’ and I said ‘Exactly.

I always sensed there was a kind of core resentment that Bruce felt he should be more appreciated for his talents. At the same time I think there is a limitation, that he does certain things better than others, and he hasn’t always chosen so wisely.”.

Before Hill edited the final theatrical version his rough cut was used to edit the trailers for the movie, which is why there is lot of alternate/deleted footage shown in them, including many alternate takes, different edits of some scenes, extended versions of scenes, some extra lines of dialogue, shots and parts of deleted scenes including additional shootout sequence between two gangs and alternate ending in which Hickey is killed by Smith in a different way.

The film was a box office bomb, grossing only a total $18,127,448 domestically by December 22, 1996, and brought in $47,267,001 worldwide.

The site’s consensus states: “Last Man Standing’s brooding atmosphere and bursts of artfully arranged action prove intriguing yet ultimately insufficient substitutes for a consistently compelling story.” Common recurring complaints address the oppressive and depressing atmosphere of the film. the flat, almost monotonous personality of Willis’ character between gunfights.

Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “C+” on an A+ to F scale.

Last Man Standing is such a desperately cheerless film, so dry and laconic and wrung out, that you wonder if the filmmakers ever thought that in any way it could be.. fun.

Even the movie’s hero is bad company..

This is such a sad, lonely movie.

The movie Looper, staring Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis, came out recently and has a lot of people talking. ***SPOILER ALERT.

What’s a Looper. A Looper is someone who receives payment for killing and disposing of people from the future.

The target suddenly appears at a predetermined time and location, bound and hooded, where a Looper awaits with gun in hand. The second the target appears, the Looper blasts them in the chest.

Now, while the movie introduces interesting philosophical concepts such time travel and free will, and they make Joseph Gordon Levitt look like Bruce Willis, they ultimately fail in both respects. Joseph Gordon Levitt looks more like Kirk Cameron than Bruce Willis, and all that complicated time travel/free will talk, well, they pretty much skipped over that part.

There is a scene in the movie where Willis and Levitt are sitting in a diner. Willis is from the future and Levitt is asking a bunch of questions about time travel.

Here’s why – time travel is complicated. In philosophy, there is a concept known as the Grandfather Paradox.

The paradox is this: Suppose you went back in time and killed your grandfather as a little boy. Your grandfather would then not grow up to have your mom or dad.

So if you were never born, you could therefore not travel back in time to kill your grandfather. It appears that you both could and could not travel back in time to kill your grandfather.

The way around this paradox is to introduce alternate dimensions or nonlinear time continuums. This way, you and your grandfather could both exist, but operate independently of one another.

It’s not so much as your grandfather as he is an alternate dimension grandfather of some alternate dimension you.

Willis, as a young man, gets a target one day, blasts him as usual and goes about his merry life. Thirty years goes by and Willis is suddenly snatched from his home one day and sent back in time to die.

So this time, when his younger self (played by Levitt) tries to kill him, he creates an act of subterfuge and escapes. Same person – two alternate time continuums.

If they are on the same dimension, then the writer failed to address the Grandfather Paradox. If Levitt doesn’t kill Willis, he cannot grow old and live his merry life, and if that doesn’t happen, he cannot be snatched and sent back in time.

Alternatively, if they are on alternate dimensions, why are they interconnected. What happens to Levitt does affect Willis.

How is it that you have a future that seems to be carved in granite, but somehow you can change it. I mentioned that Willis gets snatched from his merry life.

This enrages him so much that he kills all the men who apprehended him, jumps in the time machine, and changes the course of his life.

When Willis was a young man, he shoots his target in the chest and lives a merry life. Why didn’t the target in that scenario (his future self) do as Willis did (avoid being shot in the chest).

Every single aspect of that situation would be the same from the snatching, the murder of his wife, the rage, even the temperature and weather. If all the ingredients are the same, so too should be the choice, but it wasn’t.

As I mentioned earlier, I understand why the writer didn’t tackle these topics. In a sci-fi movie, you have to suspend disbelief a little for the sake of entertainment.

See Also: Interstellar Explained.

Oblivion Explained. Life of Pi Explained.

Edward Mullen.

Don’t adjust your monitor, dear readers. If you felt like there was a bit of a shift in our time travel educational programming, you’re absolutely right.

Which makes sense, as our latest adventure from here to there in the now and then is none other than writer/director Rian Johnson’s officially eight-year-old noir action adventure, Looper. We’ve arrived at the eighth anniversary of that time Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis played the same man, fighting it out for the sake of their own future.

Keep your straws where they stand, as we won’t be needing any complicated diagrams to break down what happens in this particular tale. So let’s get started breaking down the world of Loopers, Gat Men, and The Rainmaker himself, detailing how the time travel in Looper really works.

Picture it: Kansas City, 2044. The world is a dystopian nightmare of vagrants and time travel assisted assassinations.

It’s a system that works like clockwork… until Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has to outwit his older self (Bruce Willis) in order to uphold the system he’s a part of. Who’s Time Traveling.

A lot of unnamed targets and Loopers are sent back from the future to be taken out in a clean and easy manner. But our main time traveler is Older Joe, with a slight detour into the life of Joe’s friend and fellow Looper Seth (Paul Dano), who also has some problem with his older self (Frank Brennan).

The corridor of Looper’s time travel is a constant and exact window of 30 years, three months, two days, eight hours, and five seconds, between the future and the past. So for the film’s purpose, this window spans 2044 and 2074.

Under “business as usual” circumstances, victims and Loopers are sent back 30 years (and change) to be killed and disposed of. But between Older Joe losing his wife (Summer Qing), and the rise of the holy terror boss man known as the Rainmaker causing all sorts of chaos in 2074’s mob scene, the retired Looper is about to try and change the future for the better.

Traveling into the past of the Looper world is absolutely easy, or at least it feels that way because there’s not a lot of specific technique involved with the trips to the past shown in the film. But the lack of technique is made up for with a good number of rules that lock in the world of Rian Johnson’s script and how it uses time travel.

Say you want to kill someone in 2074, but as we learned in Looper, tagging techniques and record keeping make it a pain in the ass to do so undetected. Using your most trusted thugs, you’d abduct this subject, dress them in rather interestingly colored rags, and strap some silver to their backs as payment to the Looper in 2044 that’ll do the deed for you.

Dumping the corpse into a furnace 30 years and change in the past, the Looper collects their silver and goes about their merry criminal way. Of course, when it’s time to close their loop, a Looper’s older self takes that same path, with gold strapped to their back, waiting for their younger self to retire them in the same sort of manner.

You can’t dial it up or down. Basically, it’s gonna send you exactly 30 years, three months, two days, eight hours, and five seconds back.

So as time keeps going, the point at which you’re gonna be sent back to keeps sliding forward also. However, if the right person had the right idea, and used the correct methodology to plan out a path to a new future that could take place 30 years, three months, two days, eight hours, and five seconds in the future.

Yes, it very much can, as alterations in Looper’s space-time continuum are almost instantaneously depicted in the events of the film. much like you may be used to seeing in the Back to the Future trilogy.

Moment by moment, Older Seth loses body parts, under the watchful supervision of Noah Segan’s Kid Blue and a professional known as “The Doc”. But, of course, as we learn from Abe’s (Jeff Daniels) instructions, Seth is not to be killed, as it would be too cataclysmic to future events.

So there is an importance in not trying to change the world too much in the past. The beauty of Looper’s usage of time travel is, under typical circumstances, people from the future are being sent back to the past, through tightly controlled circumstances and limited stipulations, to be disposed of before they even existed.

unless, of course, a disgruntled set of Loopers want to change the future. Which leads to one of Looper’s key rules of time travel: “The future has infinite possibilities”.

Traveling back 30 years in his life, Older Joe has firm memories of his time with his future wife. He even carries a picture of her, helping along his memories of what he’s trying to maintain.

During the crucial moment in the diner, where Young and Old Joe talk about some of the finer points of time travel, Old Joe mentions that his memories of 2074 are clearer or cloudier, depending on what happens in 2044.

so good luck trying to scuttle back to a cupboard and think away your mistakes. On top of potentially developing new scars and losing limbs you might want to hang onto in the future, your memories will change depending on what you subject your past self to.

Up until that point, memories are subject to change and availability. Which brings us to the greatest consequence of all in Looper: the erasure of an entire person.

While Older Joe is trying to kill Cid (Pierce Gagnon), with the option of gunning down his mother Sara (Emily Blunt) to get the job done, a huge lightbulb goes off in Younger Joe’s mind. Recalling how Older Joe described The Rainmaker as being rumored to have his jaw shot off, and watching his mother die in front of him, Younger Joe decides that the best chance to try and prevent this cataclysmic future is to kill himself in the past.

By killing himself, Younger Joe prevents the deaths of Cid and Sara, and in turn has a good chance of preventing The Rainmaker from becoming a major figure in the future of organized crime.

It all leads to the fact that if Looper was to be boiled down to one, crucial point of order, it’s the following statement that Rian Johnson made when discussing the complexities of time travel: Time travel is messy.

They know to be scared to death of it. Seeing how trying to change the future leads to unpredictable, and rather bloody results, Looper isn’t afraid to show the audience the messy and unrepentant lengths some will go to in order to bend the world to their will.

Direct from the requests of you, the viewers, our next time travel journey will see us getting Lost in Space, and following some hinky temporal action dealing with the cinematic incarnation of the Jupiter 2 and its first family of space, The Robinsons. We’ll see you back here in the future, and remember, if you want to learn everything about traveling here and there in the then and now, CinemaBlend is the place you should be.

BRUCE Willis’ fellow actors and filmmakers apparently were worried for months about the actors behavior, before his family revealed Wednesday the action hero icon is suffering from aphasia.

“He was having cognitive problems, they all knew Bruce was having problems,” a source told Page Six. “Everybody knew, the cast and crew.”.

Last year, Bruce reunited with Pulp Fiction co-star John Travolta for the first time in 27 years, teaming up for the action pic Paradise City. The Hudson Hawk star was spotted on the beach in Maui filming a scene.

The movie reportedly features Bruce as a renegade bounty hunter who must carve his way through the Hawaiian crime world to wreak vengeance on the kingpin, played by John, who murdered his father. But according to Page Six, Bruce, 67, was experiencing cognitive issues on sets, and often couldn’t remember his lines.

At times, producers were forced to use body doubles, and dial back the actors screen time to accommodate him. “It was becoming super obvious he was having trouble … he could not act anymore.”.

Alongside a throwback photo of the father-daughter duo, Rumer wrote: “To Bruce’s amazing supporters, as a family we wanted to share that our beloved Bruce has been experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities. “As a result of this and with much consideration, Bruce is stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him.”.

“We are moving through this as a strong family unit, and wanted to bring his fans in because we know how much he means to you, as you do to him. “As Bruce always says, ‘Live it up’ and together we plan to do just that.”.

Bruce was married to actress Demi, 59, from 1987 to 2000. Despite the end of their marriage, the exes have remained friends and have been involved in each other’s lives.

In the days leading up to the announcement, Emma shared a series of emotional Instagram posts detailing their love. His 43-year-old wife had already been sharing touching tributes to the star throughout the month of March, which was populated with several milestones in their life together.

She, who married the Die Hard star in 2009, captioned the collage: “I don’t just love him, I really really like him,” before adding a hashtag “birthdayboy.”. Just a few days later, on March 21, the couple celebrated their 13th wedding anniversary.

She added the caption: “13 years ago, those wedding speeches really sent us over the edge. Enjoy.

Aphasia is a medical condition resulting in the inability to understand words and communicate clearly, and it typically occurs after a stroke or head injury. The onset of aphasia may be related to disease or brain tumor causing degenerative damage.

There are different patterns of aphasia: expressive, comprehensive, and global. Do you have a story for The US Sun team.

Email us at [email protected] or call 212 416 4552. Like us on Facebook at and follow us from our main Twitter account at @TheSunUS.

Bruce Willis is one of Hollywood’s most beloved action heroes. The award-winning actor, most known for the Die Hard film series, has been entertaining audiences for nearly 40 years.

Willis will be celebrating his birthday in March. So here’s a look at his age, career, and five of his most memorable films.

Willis was born on March 19, 1955, in West Germany. So in 2021, the actor will celebrate his 66th birthday.

But his breakthrough came in 1985 when he landed the recurring role of David Addison Jr. on Moonlighting opposite Cybill Shepherd.

Family bonding. pic.twitter.com/F32Dym17RZ.

His 1998 movie, Die Hard, became a box office success and turned the actor into a certified movie star. And he has since appeared in dozens of films and TV series.

He also has two daughters with his current wife, model Emma Hemming. Willis’ first blockbuster film, Die Hard, grossed $1.7 billion worldwide in the summer of 1988.

Willis reprised the role for four sequels, including A Good Day to Die Hard, which was released in 2013.

The movie was a critical success, earning seven Academy Award nominations and one win for Best Original Screenplay. In the 2015 sci-fi thriller 12 Monkeys, Willis portrays James Cole, a prisoner forced to live underground after a deadly virus is unleashed.

So he uses the gift to try and stop terrorists from releasing the virus. Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer, and Christopher Meloni also star.

When a deadly alien force threatens Earth, the Fifth Element, aka Leelu (Milla Jovovich), is awakened. After a chance encounter with Leelu, Dallas takes on the task of helping her save the world.

Bruce Willis Made a $3M Mistake Turning Down 4 Days of Work on Fan-Favorite Franchise. In M.

Malcolm Crowe. When one of his young patients, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), claims that he sees the ghosts of the dead, Crowe tries to help the boy work through his fears.

From his first uncredited role as “Man Entering Diner as Delaney Leaves” in the 1980 film The First Deadly Sin to becoming one of the biggest names in Hollywood, Bruce Willis has had a career few could imagine or hope for. Along the way, Willis portrayed characters including Peter Novins in the first episode of the 1985 The Twilight Zone revival, the voice of the baby Mikey in Look Who’s Talking, and David Addison Jr.

Willis crawled through ventilation in search of justice as John McClane. he fought for love, money, and survival in Pulp Fiction.

Willis was and is more than an action hero, playing in a diverse set of genre sandboxes, not the least of which is science fiction. Almost from the beginning Willis showed a willingness to jump into the weird and wacky in pursuit of a good story.

In March of last year, Willis’ family released a statement announcing the actor’s retirement, citing health issues. The statement went on to explain that the 67-year-old actor was diagnosed with aphasia, a cognitive disorder which impacts a person’s ability to understand and convey speech.

With Willis’ career coming to a close, now is a better time than ever to revisit some of his best genre roles. RELATED: Bruce Willis retires from acting due to health issues.

By the time Death Becomes Her (now streaming on Peacock. ) hit theaters in 1992, Willis had already starred in Die Hard and its first sequel.

Death Becomes Her reminded audiences that Willis could tell a joke and was comfortable with more than bad guys and bullets. Directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Isabella Rosellini, the story centers on the conflict between friends turned enemies.

During a visit with her friend Helen (Hawn) and Helen’s fiancé and plastic surgeon Dr. Ernest Menville (Willis), Madeline steals Ernest from Helen, leaving her heartbroken.

Meanwhile, Helen is enjoying a second life and a new book about to debut. Attempting to keep up with Helen, Madeline consumes a mysterious potion which promises eternal life, with a few inconvenient caveats.

Menville’s scalpel skills are sure to come in handy once Madeline realizes she can’t be killed, but she can be injured.

Forty years later, James Cole (Willis) lives in a prison complex beneath the streets of Philadelphia. He is given an opportunity to go back in time, recover the original virus, and return it to scientists in the future to develop a cure.

That’s the setup of Terry Gilliam’s 1995 science fiction thriller 12 Monkeys, streaming now on Peacock. On arrival, Cole discovers he has been sent back to 1990, six years before the pandemic kicks off.

Goines is an environmentalist believed to be a member of the Twelve Monkeys army, an ecoterrorist group believed to have released the virus. The truth, of course, is much more complicated, increasingly so with each additional jump through time.

In director Luc Besson’s 1997 film The Fifth Element, the only thing more star-studded than the cast is space itself. Willis runs the show but shares screen time with the likes of Milla Jovovich, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm, and Chris Tucker, to name a few.

There, an alien race known as the Mondoshawans meet with a human priest guarding the temple. They take with them four stones representing the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water and in their place, they leave a message.

When combined with a mysterious fifth element, they will become a weapon capable of defeating the great evil. Three and a half centuries later, Corbin Dallas (Willis) is a cab driver just trying to live his life beneath the shadow of an ancient prophecy he’s never heard of.

or die trying.

In Michael Bay’s definitive disaster film Armageddon, Willis stars alongside Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck, Michael Clarke Duncan, Peter Stormare, and Steve Buscemi, all of whom are in imminent danger from a planet-killing asteroid. When a passing comet disturbs the asteroid belt, it pushes a wave of meteorites into the inner solar system, some of which make direct contact with Earth.

What isn’t is the Texas-sized asteroid now headed our way. With little more than two weeks on the clock, Earth’s bravest and brightest slap together a plan to save everyone.

An oil drilling crew, of course. The logic, flawed as it may be, is that it’s easier to train drillers to become astronauts than the other way around.

What follows is a tense journey through deep space and the sort of perspective on life that you can only get from a distance.

Night Shyamalan (whose latest film Knock at the Cabin is now available on digital) on the map. The Sixth Sense (streaming now on Peacock.

Once inside, they discover one of Malcolm’s old patients in their home. The patient claims Malcolm failed him, then he shoots Malcolm before shooting himself.

Cole reminds Malcolm of his previous patient, triggering a subconscious desire to help Cole as a way of making amends for perceived past failures. Cole admits that he sees dead people walking around in the world, mixed in with the living, and they don’t know they are dead.

Willis returned for Shyamalan’s next feature film at-bat in the grounded superhero movie Unbreakable. This time Willis plays David Dunn, the sole survivor of a horrific train crash.

While leaving a memorial service for those lost in the accident, Dunn finds a note on his windshield with a question and an invitation. It asks the last time he was sick, and directs him to an art gallery run by the wheelchair bound Elijah Price (Samuel L.

Price has brittle bone disease, a condition which makes him incredibly susceptible to injury. Having lived from the moment of birth with the excruciating reality of constantly breaking bones, and taking solace in the world of comic books, Price has dedicated his life to finding extraordinary people at the opposite end of the spectrum: those with superhuman strength and imperviousness to injury.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a movie in possession of a killer cast, must be in want of Bruce Willis. Sin City packs the cast to overflowing with the likes of Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Clarke Duncan, Brittany Murphy, Josh Hartnett, and, of course, Bruce Willis.

His story begins hunting a monster, the child killer Ethan Roark Jr., son of Senator Ethan Roark and nephew of Cardinal Patrick Henry Roark. His powerful relations protect him, so Hartigan dispenses justice with a bullet.

Hoping to save Roark’s latest victim, a young girl named Nancy, Hartigan shoots Junior — blasting off his ear, his hand, and his genitals — before losing consciousness himself. Later, while Hartigan is recovering from his injuries, he receives a visit from Senator Roark, who makes it clear that he will take the blame for Junior’s crimes or watch his entire family die.

Hartigan will have to stop the Roarks and save Nancy one last time.

It opens in 2044, when a 25-year-old Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) works as assassin for a crime syndicate which exists 30 years in the future. To hide their crimes, the syndicate sends their enemies into the past, where there bodies can’t be found.