Last year marked the first time in 37 years that there wasn’t a new movie featuring Bruce Willis released in any capacity. Granted, Willis already hadn’t appeared in a theatrical release since 2019, with his small but key role in Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn, which at the time inspired a glimmer of recognition of the best Bruce Willis movies of the past. But Willis remained a presence in the world of straight-to-video titles, appearing in a whopping dozen such movies in 2022 alone, usually for 10 or 15 minutes of well-paid screen time. That was the same year that his family announced his retirement from acting in 2022 due to aphasia; they shared an updated diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia in 2023. His DTV forays, which started out resembling any number of older stars’ attempts to pick up a decent paycheck for relatively little work, took on a sadder dimension; these were either projects he was taking in hopes of banking as much money as possible for when he was no longer able to work, projects he was being ushered into without full consideration, or some combination of the two.
Yet the sheer volume of interchangeable Willis-starring DTV thrillers has some fierce competition in the form of the rest of his eclectic and substantial filmography. Willis was always a consistent worker; like fellow ‘90s superstar Nicolas Cage, he has so many movies that there are entire subgenres in his filmography, like Movies Where Bruce Willis Appears As Himself or Some Approximation of It (The Player; Loaded Weapon 1; Ocean’s 12; Nancy Drew; What Just Happened; The Lego Movie 2), Movies Where Bruce Willis Acts Opposite a Child (North; Mercury Rising; The Sixth Sense; The Kid); and Bruce Willis Assembling the Troops Throughout the Ages (The Siege; Hart’s War; Tears of the Sun). None of these subgenres are represented on this list of the best Bruce Willis movies—no, not even The Sixth Sense. Who needs a rec to watch The Sixth Sense? We’re also leaving out anything with Die Hard in the title. The first one is perfect, the sequels are fun, except the terrible fifth one; who doesn’t know this?
Instead, these best Bruce Willis movies have been selected to pay tribute to Willis’s old-fashioned strengths as a leading man and occasional character actor. Though he understandably became identified with action movies in the wake of Die Hard, he worked across genres like a studio contract player in the 1940s, doing drama, comedy, adventure, sci-fi, thrillers, often with steadfast understatement and efficiency (though he could ham it up when required, too). These thirteen movies are ranked by their strength as Bruce Willis movies, meaning his specific performance is given greater weight than it might otherwise bear, especially given his willingness to take less-glamorous supporting parts in offbeat films. The movies aren’t quite the same without him. –Jesse Hassenger
For the full list of movies, click here.
