Mercury Rising (1998)

Thankfully swapping out the title of the book it is adapted from ("Simple Simon"), this uninspired action thriller has Bruce Willis starring as a cop protecting nine-year-old Simon from assassins after Simon cracks a top-secret government "super code", and about the only convincing thing in the whole movie is not its action - a yawn-inducing string of shootouts across busy public spaces like hospitals - nor its depiction of autism, Rain Man-style brilliant savantism used purely only as a MacGuffin that could just as easily have been studiousness or, let's face it, an RSA key on a dog's collar, and not its cryptography (government supercodes published in wordfind magazines as a strength test) but its depiction of gendered home roles: Bruce Willis bumps into a woman in a cafe - a woman he doesn't know - and within minutes, in heated bathroom arguments, he guilts her into passing up career opportunities to be Simon's stay-at-home carer.

★★☆☆☆

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Die Hard 4.0: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

Nothing will ever compare to Die Hard 1.0, but this third attempt at recapturing the original's success is the best so far, even with its two or three more-than-unlikely, how-could-he-have-known-to-do-that? action sequences during a "fire sale" terrorist attack upon America that mobilises John McClane and sees him charged with protecting a perfectly cast Justin Long as the code-writer in over his head but still able to look down upon his Luddite savior.

★★★★☆

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G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)

By the time some fun stuff arrives - cliffside martial acrobatics, Mission: Impossible-style infiltrations of black tie events and the fast and furious flashbacks that made G.I. Joe: the Rise of the Cobra such unexpected fun - you'll have been burned by a dull boysy first hour where men chortle about their "girl" conquests, snigger about "girls and their guns", leer at legs and you will have already decided Hasbro's action doll franchise needs to stay in 2013.

★★☆☆☆

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Glass (2019)

** SPOILER WARNING **

Having in the last unexpected scene of 2016's Split created a connection between that film and his Unbreakable film from sixteen years earlier, M Night Shyamalan continues the unlikely series in this third film by having a new character, Dr Ellie Staple, assemble the old characters in a psychiatric ward for sessions of psychoanalysis designed to break the patients' shared delusion that they are superheroes, which, as a plot, raises interesting ideas about human potential, shared experience and the limits people place on themselves, and with the glut of superhero blockbusters in cinemas, this plot provides a welcome spin on a tired genre, but the movie errs in the end when it seems to choose a side but abandons viewers on the other side of the movie's central question: is anything extraordinary happening on the screen?

★★★☆☆

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Striking Distance (1993)

With 25 minutes to go, Bruce Willis' Detective Tom Hardy casually drops that he was closely connected with each of the three female victims of the serial killer he is hunting, a detail you'd think even the most dejected, alcoholic cop traumatised by his partner's and his father's deaths might have mentioned sooner (and even if he suspects the killer of all these people is someone on the force), but this wooden police procedural, almost so bad it's good, is more about cramming in the clichés, not about clever plotting, so Tommy's new partner, a woman he remains unkind to until she offers sex, is the next to be kidnapped, and a distinctly uninteresting denouement ensues that suggests ultimately that the connection Hardy had with the victims was a passing coincidence afterall.

★★☆☆☆

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Hostage (2005)

The Die Hard series went on hiatus between 1995 and 2007 once the awful Die Hard With A Vengeance (that dopey one with John McClane playing Simon Says with the Riddler) demonstrated no-one was very sure how to keep the series fresh, so in the downtime Bruce Willis decided to star in this 2005 movie adaptation of a Robert Crais book about a hostage situation in a smaller Nakatomi Plaza - the family home of a rich mob accountant - that needs a John McClane (reluctant hero cop Jeff Talley, upon whom family members' lives depend) and like the Die Hard sequels, it is overthought and nowhere near as good as the original Die Hard.

★★☆☆☆

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Death Becomes Her (1992)

Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep and Bruce Willis ham it up in this gothic black comedy about anti-ageing, but really the movie is just a thin excuse to showcase special effects that wowed in the day.

★★★☆☆

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Vice (2015)

A company, "Vice", that offers hedonistic roleplaying experiences, embellishes its A.I. sex robots with elaborate backstories and personalities, which seems a fairly unnecessary thing to do not just for the clientele who are not privy to the robots' bedtime conversations with their robot sisters but also unnecessary to the chase that occupies most of this daft scifi's runtime when one of the sex robots escapes Vice and for an hour and a half runs through point blank machine-gun fire.

★☆☆☆☆

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Split (2016)

I went into this horror thriller about three girls kidnapped by a man with 23 or perhaps 24 distinct personalities confident I had worked out in advance director M Night Shyamalan's trademark twist and I am pleased to say the always fascinating Split is not one of Shyamalan's bad films like Lady In The Water but a good one like Unbreakable in that it delivers a delicious curveball in the end that is as unexpected as it is dismaying (because my ending was less surprising but better and certainly what was intended, I think, before the marketing team's endscene got tacked-on instead).

★★★★☆

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Die Hard (1988)

Ever since Hans Gruber and his 'terrorists' faced off with John McClane in the Nakatomi Plaza, action movies have tried to emulate the 80s action classic Die Hard to the extent a formula developed: add to one hostage situation an everyman hero, a droll baddie who spends a scene pretending to be a hostage, then mix in a smarmy, self-interested double-crossing hostage who gets his comeuppance; among the hostages, have an insider love-interest, while outside there is an out-of-their-depth assistant; and make the authorities, the police and government agencies, powerless; but despite the efforts of many copycats, no action flick has bettered Die Hard's formula - not even its four sequels.

★★★★★

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The Fifth Element (1997)

Incessantly noisy and goofy to the point of pantomime, Luc Besson's scifi fairytale is full of elaborate surface details - wacky costumes, sets, and creatures - that hardly compensate for the movie's threadbare, incoherent and overlong story of a 23rd Century taxi driver embroiled in a battle for control of a powerful weapon.

★★☆☆☆

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The Sixth Sense (1999)

The spooky thriller that momentarily shot director M Night Shyamalan and child star Haley Joel Osment to fame features Toni Collette as the mother of a troubled boy (Osment) who sees dead people, Bruce Willis as the child psychologist trying to help, and a now famous twist in the movie's tail.

★★★★☆

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Pulp Fiction (1994)

A series of interconnected noir vignettes comes to life under Quentin Tarantino's direction, in this pulp fiction romp as compulsively watchable today as it was upon its release in 1994.

★★★★☆

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Unbreakable (2000)

M Night Shyamalan has made some good movies and some stinkers, and this one with its hypnotic tone, Bruce Willis' gravitas as the sole survivor of a plane crash, and a clever slow shift of the story into an unexpected direction is terrific.

★★★★☆

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Twelve Monkeys (1995)

The joy of Terry Gillam's Twelve Monkeys, a thrilling drama that works with the Slaughterhouse Five themes of time, memory, and questions of what is real and what isn't, is watching the madness ebb and flow and transplant itself back and forth between the leads, so that first it is Willis, then Stowe, then Willis again, whose reality - with the help of unbalanced camera angles - teeters on collapse.

★★★★★

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Looper (2012)

This deadly earnest sci-fi movie forgets to inject any fun into its convoluted time travel story.

★★☆☆☆

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