It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Bruce Willis seemed to give up on trying anything interesting or exciting and decided to follow Nicolas Cage down the rabbit hole into the world of terrible VOD action movies, but the 65 year-old has certainly gone all-in, with his descent into mediocrity coinciding with the most prolific period of his entire career.
If you discount his franchise turns that include playing John McClane for a fifth time in the awful A Good Day to Die Hard and a sixth in The LEGO Movie sequel, cameos in the first two Expendables before he was kicked out by Sylvester Stallone after demanding too much money to appear in the third, both installments of the short-lived Red series, a brief role in G.I. Joe: Retaliation and his appearances in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Glass along with a return in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, then the action icon has featured in just eight original movies since 2010 that have been released theatrically. And they all bombed at the box office with the exception of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and Rian Johnson’s Looper.
Ironically, Moonrise Kingdom and Looper were also the only ones that weren’t savaged by critics, with Willis giving his only two memorable performances over the last decade in the process. In that same time-frame, the Armageddon star has shown up in no less than eighteen bargain basement actioners, but one of his very few and also very worst big screen efforts is set to land on Hulu next month, on September 1st.
2012’s The Cold Light of Day has a decent cast, with Willis being lent support by Sigourney Weaver and Henry Cavill, but the movie itself is about as banal and uninspired as the title. The painfully generic thriller barely recouped the $20 million budget in theaters, and currently holds a dismal Rotten Tomatoes score of just 4%.
Longtime fans of Bruce Willis will no doubt add it to their watch list, but for everyone else, The Cold Light of Day most definitely isn’t worth 93 minutes of your time. Or any of your time, for that matter.
