Bruce Willis' Sixth Sense For The Brooding Hero

As The Sixth Sense Turns 25, Revisiting Bruce Willis' Heroics

As seen in The Sixth Sense, at his best Willis both tantalised and surprised with his craft, writes Ben McCann

WE ALL KNOW the twist to The Sixth Sense by now. But M Night Shyamalan’s supernatural thriller — which turned 25 on August 6 — is perhaps even better remembered for the performances. Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette of course, but also Bruce Willis’ measured and understated performance as Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist whose young patient can talk to the dead.

Malcolm’s assumptions are wrong in this film, just as ours are: one of the most memorable aspects of Willis’ performance in retrospect is that, as an actor, he knows the twist from the start, but as the character he does not. The film’s muted visual design and slow-burning pace is mirrored perfectly by the actor. Shyamalan’s camera zooms and tracks drop clues, but Willis never lets on. He would work again with Shyamalan in Unbreakable (2000), a clever twist on the superhero genre.

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In 2022, Willis’ family announced the actor’s decision to step away from the arclights after a diagnosis of aphasia (a language disorder caused by damage in the area of the brain controlling language expression and comprehension). It was a cruel end to a career that, while dwindling, had remained astonishingly prolific. Willis wisecracked his way through several direct-to-video genre releases; reviews tended to be uniformly negative. “Phoning it in” became a byword for the actor’s post-2012 career choices, after his last critically successful films, Looper and Moonrise Kingdom.

But as seen in The Sixth Sense, in his prime, Willis’ craft could both tantalise and surprise. Terry Gilliam — who directed Willis in one of his most complex performances as a time traveller tasked with saving the world from a deadly virus — in 1995’s 12 Monkeys, once described the actor as “a guy who was vulnerable, a man who’s lost, not the man in charge of the whole thing”. It is this paradox — helplessness and resilience — that defined Willis’s screen persona for four decades.

THE BRUCE BRAND OF BRAVADO

In 1988, one of Hollywood’s most laser-focused high concept pitches — NYPD cop saves hostages in a skyscraper on Christmas Eve — gave Willis the chance to hit the stratosphere. As John McClane in Die Hard, Willis almost single-handedly defined the irreverent action hero in the late 1980s, bringing an everyman quality to his roles that made up for in quips and smirks what he lacked in the hardened muscularity of a Jean-Claude van Damme or an Arnold Schwarzenegger. Willis would return to the Die Hard franchise every few years. The law of diminishing returns inevitably kicked in, but the original played up Willis’ vulnerability beneath the bravado.

Willis could always be relied upon when heroism was wanted. Need someone to climb to the roof of a church and save two kids in the middle of a lightning storm? Wes Anderson, in the delightfully off-beat Moonrise Kingdom (2012), knew just the man. Need someone to lead a crack team of oil drillers into space and blow up an asteroid headed for Earth? Michael Bay’s Armageddon (1998) — the high watermark of impending planetary disaster films — might not have worked as well were it not for Willis’s deadly seriousness at the centre of this madcap plot.

BRUCE’S BEST

In Country (1989) is Exhibit A when listing Willis’ bona fides as an actor. Light years away from John McClane, and an exciting glimpse of what he was capable of when given a good script and a no-nonsense director, Willis plays a Kentucky-based Vietnam vet struggling with PTSD. If this story has been told before, no matter: Willis reins in the mannerisms and the one-liners and fashions something far removed from anything he ever played subsequently: a sad, lonely survivor, withdrawn from the world, passively shuffling through life.

Willis’ role as Butch Coolidge, the ageing boxer in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) has perennially been overshadowed by John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson’s more showy turns. But watching the film once again gives a renewed look: Willis is both crumpled and brutal, exposed and ruthless. Tarantino cast him deliberately. “Bruce has the look of a ‘50s actor. I can’t think of any other star that has that look,” the auteur said.

Willis’ scenes with Ving Rhames in the basement of the sleazy pawn shop sit at the heart of the film, while his interactions with Maria de Medeiros as his girlfriend Fabienne are gentle and blackly comic. It gave Willis’ career a shot of adrenaline, and showed Hollywood how star power (and a significant pay cut) could exist within American independent cinema.

Ben McCann is an associate professor at the University of Adelaide. This post is excerpted and modified from an essay that originally appeared on The Conversation.

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