What Happened To Charm?

Bruce Willis has made a whole bunch of crappy movies this past decade. Bandits, Hart's War, Hostage, Lucky Number Slevin, one after the other, lame lame lame. He's made a couple good movies - "Tears of the Sun" is three-quarters a great action flick and one-quarter a cut-rate African "Schindler's List"; "The Sixth Sense" features probably the most normal character Willis will ever play (except for that one thing); "Unbreakable" is Shyamalan at the height of his gifts, right before his arrogance destroyed him, and Willis finds the perfect mix of existential dread and lovable loser. "Grindhouse" and "Sin City" are good movies, but both films also demonstrate everything wrong about pretty much everything Willis has done since "The Fifth Element" - he's so damned serious. Robert Rodriguez is a wizard at casting, but you get the feeling he doesn't give the actors a whole lot of direction - Willis basically wears the same stonefaced look in both movies, like he's got a bad case of James Dean syphilis.

In most of these bad movies, Willis plays a man of great reputation - a colonel, or a top cop, or a shadowy contract killer, or a famous thief. Important men. Men you can count on. This is problem number one. Willis is not particularly good at playing confident. And he's so wonderful at playing confusion. People tend to lump him in with other aging 80s action stars, but Willis never had the super-pumped athletic quality that made Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme such big stars - a good thing, since that meant he wasn't let down by the ravages of age like they all were (look at Stallone now - botox to keep him young, steroids to keep him strong, sequels to pay the bills...)

There was always an element of self-mockery, and amusement; but there was also a wonderful befuddlement. And there was just a touch of fear. In the Die Hard trilogy, there was always that John McClane scream - when someone was shooting at him, or when he narrowly avoided an explosion. (Jason Bourne never screams. Hell, Jason Bourne barely ever talks.) There's a great scene in "Die Hard 2" when McClane is hiding inside a plane. The bad guys throw in a grenade. And another one. And a couple dozen more. Willis's eyes widen. He ejects just in time, and as the plane explodes underneath him, he breathlessly yells "Oh, Shit!" It's a classic Willis moment - he's frightened, but he's also juiced by his own ridiculosity. You can tell he's having fun.


Modern action heroes carry the weight of the world on their shoulder. Superheroes almost never crack a smile, no matter what kind of cool shit they do - Batman grimaces, Spidey cries, Superman stares blankly into space. Post 9/11, we have the Serious Action Hero - replace smirky Pierce Brosnan with killer-eye Daniel Craig. But it's not just the characters - the whole aesthetic of action movies has shifted towards the gritty, with handheld cameras and bleached out colors. It leaves you to wonder - whatever happened to charm? You know, that zesty pleasure you get from watching interesting people on the big screen. "Spider-Man 3" is generally regarded as a failure - too overstuffed on its own grandiosity - but it has some of the funniest scenes in recent memory that hint that Sam Raimi could be the first great screwball comedy director in generations if he could just set aside the webs.

Anytime that J. Jonah Jameson is onscreen, everyone in the theater almost breaks down laughing - there's something about J. K. Simmons' deadpan lightning delivery that recalls nothing so much as Cary Grant in "His Girl Friday" - couldn't there be a great movie made about the office of "The Daily Bugle?" And then there's Bruce Campbell, Raimi's old "Evil Dead" star who cameoed in all three movies. Watching Tobey Maguire play off Campbell (especially in 2, as the "Snooty Usher") is like watching two worlds of acting collide - there's Maguire, all flustered-nerd romantic, and there's Campbell, letting his chin do the talking. Maguire is a fine actor, but especially in 3, you can sense that he's trying just a little bit too hard. You can see the effort. Cambell makes it look effortless. No accident that he was cast as a mustachioed Errol Flynn type in "The Majestic."

Most of the great superhero movies are comedies in disguise. Think of Iceman cooling Wolverine's Dr. Pepper, or Hellboy ordering more pancakes, or Lex Luthor seducing a wealthy old great grandmother, or pretty much anything Michael Caine says in "Batman Begins". It's not that they're mocking the genre, like the horrific "Batman and Robin" - they're just taking a break from all the end-of-the-world portension and letting the characters breathe a little. It's little moments of humanity, what used to be called acting. I love the "Bourne" movies, but it's no accident that the main character is quite literally a cipher, a man without an identity - and although Damon is wonderful at playing a man in search of himself, Bourne might be the first man whose existential crisis leads him into a car chase.

By contrast, consider "Ronin," a nice little gem which might just be the great action movie of the 90s, mainly because it feels like it comes straight out of the 60s. "Ronin" is the anti-event movie: a bunch of middle-aged guys drive through France trying to get a suitcase, whose contents are never revealed. But it's a film of such pokerfaced wonder - "You ever kill a man?" "I hurt somebody's feelings once." Compare the end of Ronin - a couple dudes talk, joke, drink coffee, leave - to the end of Spiderman 3 - Spidey cries, Mary Jane cries, the Goblin cries, the Sandman cries, and the sun rises over New York.