I understand what you’re getting at, but after having seen it first-hand, I disagree. Instead, I would characterize is as an arrangement for other people to profit from one disabled man’s celebrity. I’m not convinced Willis is drawing any benefit from it, and watching him in these movies just drives the point home. He’s confused, he’s probably sad and angry and unsure how to express it, he doesn’t know any of these people, and he’s being told to stand someplace and say things he clearly doesn’t understand for reasons he doesn’t comprehend. I’m sure it’s familiar to some corner of Willis’ brain, but it’s not acting, it’s not storytelling, it’s not furthering any of these movies as anything other than a trashy no-budget project in which a man’s very real, non-faked, actual misfortune and confusion is put on display in a place where the script clearly wanted the 80s action hero or Moonlighting star we all remember fondly. He no longer exists.
I guess I’m just fishing for anyone else who’s seen these movies since Willis’ diagnosis. I didn’t feel this way until I actually watched one of them, and now I just can’t shake it and I’m wondering if it affects y’all the same way.
I haven’t chanced to watch any of his movies since some of the more damning stories were shared in this thread, but I had watched several whoppers not long before then, and the new information has definitely changed my perspective, and I cringe now when I reflect on what I experienced then and on how amused I was.
I recently watched Deadlock, and the film was just bad. But there were these weird moments in the film where Bruce would just start laughing, and I am thinking to myself, he can’t get the words out. And it is so weird that the director just left it in the film.
I had zero interest in watching one of these movies before you shared your thoughts, Tom, and now I’m at no way in hell because I’m sure I would agree with you.
I don’t think Butler has any cognitive decline yet but his career is following a similar path. He looks pretty haggard here and 300 was what only in 2006?
Strongly agree with you Tom…
After watching a very close uncle suffer from dementia and to watch him slowly fade away before my eyes, there is no way I can watch these newer movies of his to see this happen on screen, very sad actualy…
I want to watch one, but I’ve seen elder abuse and kids taking advantage of a parent to bleed them of money as their faculties wain ( I have 3 awful cousins doing this to their Mom, my Aunt, right now and it makes me furious), and I think I’d be aghast if I felt that’s what was going on here too. So to spare myself the ache I probably won’t watch any of these, even out of idle curiosity.
It was the producer’s first time in the director’s chair, and things weren’t going well. For the last half-hour on the set of “Midnight in the Switchgrass,” the filmmaker and his colleagues had been trying to persuade Bruce Willis to kick open a door.
A voice coming through the actor’s earpiece coached him through his lines. A stunt coordinator gently attempted to guide him. Yet, take after take, Willis did not seem to understand, according to seven crew members who were present for the late-night shoot. Emmett rose from behind the video monitor and mimed the actions, urging Willis to emulate him. When the effort failed, the director left the set in frustration, three of the crew members said.
“Did I do something wrong?” Willis asked, searching the concerned faces of the below-the-line team.
That night, Emmett’s then-fiancee, Lala Kent, said Emmett called her crying.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Kent recalled him saying in a call overheard by two other people. “It’s just so sad. Bruce can’t remember any of his lines. He doesn’t know where he is.”
But in the 15 months after filming “Midnight in the Switchgrass,” Emmett made five more movies with Willis.
Emmett, in a statement to The Times, denied the conversation with Kent occurred or that he was aware “of any decline in Mr. Willis’ health.”
That’s awful. I wonder if (since there was money to be made) he could just convince himself that it was okay to continue making films as long as he just toned down his expectations of what Bruce was capable of on camera. Less kicking, more sitting.
In hindsight, it’s easy to vilify these filmmakers. (I mean, look at that quote, “searching the concerned faces…”) But if Bruce was saying he wanted to keep acting, it would be difficult to know where to draw the line.
When you watch a movie and you see a stunt man get hurt for real, it takes you out of the movie. When you watch a movie and you see a mentally infirm man being sad and confused for real, it takes you out of the movie.
I wonder where his manager and family / handler were during that. If he was that bad, he couldnt have been traveling alone, right? I really wanted to believe that these movies were done with bruce willis’s concent and knowledge of his future condition, and not an exploitation , trying to squeeze the last few dollors out of a confused man.
