Word: star
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...Shepherd's airy prom queen, and its success propelled him into a series of big-screen comedies for which the best remedy is amnesia. It took Die Hard in 1988, and a poster of Willis all muscled up and sweaty, to make him a plausible cop-hero action star...
...Academy Award? Willis's name doesn't come up much at Oscar time, and it's not as if he shows any signs of caring about industry recognition. Maybe people in Hollywood think of him as just another tough guy, wise-ass and cocksure, and figure that star acting is something that lucky people are born with and get well paid for. But think of some signal films of the past decade or so: Pulp Fiction, M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. The Die Hard series, for that matter. At the center...
...Willis is the one star from the Bronzed Age of '80s action movies who still can persuasively embody a haunted, implacable stud. Chuck Norris went into TV, as a Texas Ranger and a cheerleader for Glenn Beck. Jean-Claude Van Damme is mostly reduced to made-for-video cheapies. Schwarzenegger's in the public sector. Jackie Chan still makes movies on both sides of the Pacific, but a lifetime of martial-arts exertions has rendered him creaky. Only Willis remains - the last action hero. (Clint Eastwood doesn't count; he came two decades before these guys and, besides...
...flop wouldn't be surprising. The box office numbers will tell you that Willis isn't in the star stratosphere. Since The Sixth Sense in 1999, Live Free or Die Hard is his only live-action vehicle to top $100 million domestic. In part that's because Willis makes the movies he wants to, alternating pop fare with offbeat comedies and art-house vehicles. He agreed to do The Sixth Sense only on the condition that Disney would bankroll a movie he really wanted to make, Alan Rudolph's version of Breakfast of Champions. One movie made $294 million...
...hefty price tag, and conclude that they can do as well with somebody younger and cheaper. But none of today's kids can give an action role the experience, the ingrained grittiness, that he can. There's simply no surrogate for Bruce Willis. As a star and an actor, he's the real, irreplaceable thing...