Should I give up on him?
I remember when the Planet Hollywood in Orlando had just opened... I was 17 years old and standing right at the red carpet. Wesley Snipes had just shook my hand and I was waiting for Bruce to walk by. I was holding a sign that said "Yippy-ki-yay... Bruce Willis is the man!" (yeah, I was a movie nerd)... finally, Bruce walked by and didn't notice me... but alas, the beautiful Demi Moore was on his arm and looked my way. She patted Bruce on the stomach and pointed him in my direction... he nodded and mouthed the word "Cool" and came to shake my hand. An epic moment for a kid whose favorite film was Die Hard and had just a couple months earlier watched the game changing Pulp Fiction at the movie theater I worked at... Bruce was indeed "the man".
Up until 1988, Harrison Ford was my favorite actor (to this day nobody is as cool as Han Solo), Bruce Willis was merely my favorite "t.v. actor"... even as a kid I thought he was wonderful as David Addison on Moonlighting. But then Die Hard was released and I saw it for my 11th birthday with my dad... It was truly the best time I had ever had at a movie theater! And it replaced Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as my favorite movie of all-time (a position it held since I saw it four times in the theater in 1984 when I was 7 years old)!
Back then, Bruce could do no wrong in my book... with classics like 12 Monkeys and The Fifth Element... underrated solid action fare like Striking Distance and Last Man Standing... even his big budget bombs like Hudson Hawk and Color of Night were entertaining (truth be told, I love Hudson Hawk)... and of course Die Hard 2 and Die Hard with a Vengeance were good solid sequels... but my favorite of Bruce's 90's era action films is without a doubt the Shane Black scripted The Last Boy Scout, a 40's style detective noir disguised as a formula action buddy flick... truly awesome.
Then came Armageddon, the 2nd biggest film of '98 and The Sixth Sense, the 2nd biggest film of '99... followed by the cult favorite Unbreakable and varying success throughout the early 2000's, with standouts being Grindhouse (Planet Terror segment) and Sin City, with Hart's War and 16 Blocks as underrated and underperforming... but Live Free or Die Hard became the highest grossing Die Hard film ever in 2007 (and in my opinion - and most film critic's opinions, as well, judging by Rotten Tomatoes - the best of the Die Hard sequels). He followed with a good (not great) sci-fi film, Surrogates... and the unfairly maligned Cop-Out...
...Then, in 2010, came The Expendables. It was an extremely brief cameo, but it was the most talked about scene of the film... and the possible start to a great franchise... and with Red over-performing to the tune of $90 million domestic with mainly positive reviews the same year, Bruce was seemingly still on top...
...Enter Emmett/Furla... and the downward spiral of Bruce's career... The first in his series of Direct to Video stinkers was Set-Up, followed in rapid succession by Catch .44, The Cold Light of Day (which was actually given a pathetic theatrical release to cash in on Henry Cavill's upcoming Superman fame), Lay the Favorite, Fire with Fire, The Prince, Vice, and Extraction... with more to come shortly... Randall Emmett and George Furla produced almost every one of those films... they are basically the new Golan/Globus (remember them from Cannon films), but even worse... at least the Golan/Globus films were so bad they were good... or trashy, "guilty pleasures"... the Emmett/Furla films are just plain boring...
...since Bruce began this Emmett/Furla cycle of films he seems to have cursed his career for even his non Emmett/Furla movies... Sin City 2, Red 2, the excellent Looper and even the fifth Die Hard film have failed to capture anywhere near a blockbuster audience and along with Looper, Moonrise Kingdom is the only film in years to have received anything resembling critical praise for his work... The more Emmett/Furla films he makes the worse his prospects of regaining any kind of respect from his fans or critics... and with his upcoming roster of films he doesn't look to be breaking ties with them any time soon...
So should I just give up on him? Or will he have some kind of renaissance?