Before Bruce Willis was sadly diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, he had starred in an innumerable amount of direct-to-video movies. They were clear paycheck gigs, with Willis typically being given top billing, featured front and center on the poster, but only briefly appearing in the films themselves.
Since 2014, Willis has started in over 35 of these movies — in 2022 alone he had his name stamped on 12 of them. All of these projects received extremely poor reviews, and the Razzies even gave Willis his own category (which they later rescinded after his diagnosis).
However, Quentin Tarantino, no stranger to hot takes, is defending Willis’ direct-to-video movies on his Video Archives Podcast. The filmmaker admitted having binged a bunch of these titles recently and coming out of the experience impressed by what he’d seen.
“These movies that he’s been making for these companies have really gone under fire in a really big way, and there’s been these kinds of expose articles written about them and talking shit about these movies,” Tarantino said. “I was really impressed by Bruce in these movies,” he added. “I thought he was really charming in them. He’s really fun.”
Tarantino does admit that it’s obvious, in many of these movies, that Willis was operating with an earpiece. “You can never have a scene where he says a line, somebody else says a line, and he says a line back,” he explained. “You’re getting one line out of him at a time, so there’s always a cut. But he’s making it work. He’s not phoning in his performances.”
QT continued, “I ended up watching about six of them, they’re very easy to watch. They’re very entertaining. There’s not a classic among them, there’s no “One-Armed Executioner,” but the people who are putting these movies down obviously have never seen any real exploitation movies before.”
He went on to single out “Vice,” “Trauma Center,” and “Deadlock” as the best of the ones he watched. “In ‘Vice,’ Bruce looks like a million dollars,” he said. “He’s terrific, it’s a good role for him, he’s a lot of fun in it. I wish he had more to do because he’s really good.”
I can’t say I’ve seen many of Willis’ direct-to-video movies, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Tarantino is very wrong when it comes to the ones he’s praising. Have any readers even bothered watching them? If you have, are there any actually worth recommending?