For a long time, it was easy to rag on Bruce Willis for stacking his filmography with so many direct-to-video action thrillers that almost always proved to be awful. However, in the aftermath of the Die Hard icon being diagnosed with aphasia and then ultimately dementia, his reasons for choosing quantity over quality became apparent.
Not only did the actor know that he was running out of time to keep doing the thing that he loves, but his prolific nature also ensured that he’d be earning as much money as possible before he was forced to step away from being in front of the cameras. It’s a tragic situation, one that’s left his fans conflicted after a particularly scathing review of Assassin emerged.
Touted as Willis’ final role, it ticks all of the boxes we’ve come to expect from the 68 year-old over the last decade or so, in that it’s a trigger-happy genre flick that only requires him to appear in a handful of scenes. That being said, a Reddit thread has been left aghast after Variety critic Dennis Harvey went in hard on the veteran A-lister’s performance, which is making people feel uncomfortable.
It’s one thing to trash Assassin for not being very good – which is almost certainly will be given the sum of its respective parts – but piling in on Willis specifically is in bad taste. Blasting it as “a regrettable close to a significant career” and singling out Willis for the way in which “his walk-through performance seems downright bored” comes across as a touch out of order.
After all, it’s public knowledge that Willis’ health deterioration left him unable to remember his lines, and it’s not as if he could shoot a six-week movie and be operating at 100 percent throughout, leaving the panning of Assassin to feel spiteful more than anything else.
