Bruce Willis has been one of Hollywood’s premier badasses since the 1980s. But, in the holy trinity of Planet Hollywood’s action hero owners, he seems like the odd man out. Compared to Stallone or Schwarzenegger – just in terms of body size – you’d struggle to see how he’d fit into that equation just from looking at him. Willis was always about being relatable over being a godlike Adonis.
Willis has won our hearts, year after year, over the decades through his truly badass characters. Here, we salute his best and baddest from surly cops to superlative assassins. Here’s our picks for Bruce Willis’ ten most badass characters.
Joe Hallenbeck (The Last Boy Scout)
When burnt out private detective Joe Hallenbeck becomes embroiled in a plot to assassinate a senator, he’s forced to team up with an equally burnt out former football star. Together, they dish out some of the best buddy cop banter from Hollywood’s number one buddy cop screenwriter, Shane Black.
Though Joe may not seem like it on the outside, he was once a respected Secret Service agent who even took several bullets for the president. He became a self-confessed scumbag and alcoholic after getting fired for punching the previously mentioned senator in the face after Joe found him beating a woman. Joe still saves his life, though. And then punches him in the face again.
Harry S. Stamper (Armageddon)
A man so good at drilling that it’s easier for NASA to teach him how to go into space than it is to teach NASA how to drill as well as him. Harry S. Stamper loves his daughter so much that he’ll shoot guns at oil rigs and blow up asteroids, even if he’s on them. In the face of insurmountable odds, Harry clings on to hope and takes on all that Earth and space can throw at him.
Literally saving the entire planet is a plot point that even the most ridiculous action movies consider to be a bit too far. But ‘too much’ doesn’t really exist in Michael Bay’s vocabulary so that’s exactly what Harry does, in as explosive a fashion as it's possible to do. There’s worse ways to go.
The Jackal (The Jackal)
An infamous international assassin, The Jackal is kind of like the original Winter Soldier. He’s so deadly, and so mysterious, that many doubt that he actually exists. The Jackal is a master of disguise who can speak a dozen languages, seduce any man or woman and take out the most impossible of targets without even being seen.
Willis plays The Jackal with a distinct iciness. He even gives a young Jack Black a bloody butchering worse than the one he got in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Mentally unhinged and absolutely ruthless, he might be Willis’ most genuinely frightening character to date.
Lieutenant A.K. Waters (Tears of the Sun)
The leader of an elite team of Navy SEALs, Waters is a stone cold pragmatist that isn’t concerned about anybody’s feelings. He’s just concerned about completing the mission. Of course, Monica Bellucci’s saintly doctor sees the good in him and reveals Waters’ bleeding heart when he turns their simple extraction mission in wartorn Uganda into a rescue mission for a group of civilians.
Waters might be the most unemotional that the usually-charming Willis has ever been on screen. He gets straight to the point, and means it when he says he’ll shoot you in the head if you don’t tell him what he wants to know. But he’ll also go down stoically against an outmatching force just to do the right thing.
John Smith (Last Man Standing)
A drifter on the run, John Smith winds up in a rundown town in West Texas on his way to the border. There, he finds two warring gangs who he decides to play off of each other even further to make the most amount of money. Most of the time, it feels like he’s just doing it for fun and John gets trigger happy very fast.
John Smith utilizes Willis’ stony death stare better than maybe any other character he’s played. He says his curse is that he was born without a conscience but you figure out that that’s not entirely true. Nonetheless, the man is a maestro with a gun in each hand. He makes symphonies with the sound of falling shell casings. The movie is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s infamous samurai movie Yojimbo, which was already remade into the equally infamous A Fistful of Dollars – the movie which gave the world Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name. Willis lives up to the legacy.
Jack Mosely (16 Blocks)
When washed up NYPD detective Jack Mosely is told to deliver a witness from lock up to a court hearing sixteen blocks away, he finds he got more than he bargained for. It turns out that Mos Def’s witness is on his way to bring down a corrupt cop and the dirtiest members of the NYPD won’t let that happen. Jack’s an out-of-shape alcoholic who couldn't care less about his job anymore and what makes him a badass is how, even with all of his flaws, he instinctively drops the bottle from his hand to save the witness’ life.
With the whole city against him, those sixteen blocks might as well be a hundred miles. But he runs the gauntlet. Jack Mosely is a great character for Willis because there’s never anything superhuman about him. The guy sweats from jogging a few hundred meters like the rest of us but he risks everything at a moment's notice because he knows what’s right and what’s wrong. Isn’t that the most badass quality?
Butch Coolidge (Pulp Fiction)
Butch Coolidge is such a badass that he kills the guy you assumed was the main character about halfway through the movie. He may not be put through as sustained a wringer as some of Willis’ other badasses but Butch still has a pretty bad day. Rather than take a dive, like he was told to by a local mob boss, Butch wins his boxing match and runs for it. He punches his opponent so hard, in fact, that he accidentally kills him.
Upon discovering that his father’s watch got left behind, he risks his life to rescue it just as his father did in the Vietnam war. After killing the assassin sent to kill him –the aforementioned presumed main character – he spots the mob boss trying to kill him and runs him down in his car but the pair of them actually end up in a pretty terrifying random kidnap situation. Butch manages to escape but can’t bring himself to leave even a sworn enemy to an undignified fate so he goes proto-Kill Bill on the captors with a samurai sword. The guy is pretty solid.
David Dunn (Unbreakable/Split/Glass)
M. Night Shyamalan’s downtrodden security guard emerges from a disastrous rail crash without a scratch on his body and slowly comes to terms with the fact that he may be a real-life superhero. Spurred on by his relationship with Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr. Glass, David Dunn goes on to become known as The Overseer – a seemingly-unstoppable vigilante in the city of Philadelphia.
Able to bend steel with his bare hands and glimpse the innermost sins of bad guys just by touching them, David Dunn would be indestructible if it weren’t for his genre-mandated kryptonite – water. We all have our flaws.
John Hartigan (Sin City)
The tough cop from the fictional Basin City takes some tough actions and makes some even tougher decisions. After risking his life to save a young girl from the clutches of a serial murder – and castrating him with a gun – John is forced to go to prison for the killer’s crimes or face retribution against innocent people from the killer’s well-connected father.
After serving years in prison for the crimes, he emerges when he realizes that the young girl’s life is in danger again. Faced by the monstrous remains of the killer – that have been steadily rebuilt while Hartigan was in jail – Hartigan takes him and his goons on single-handedly once again. This time, John castrates the killer with his bare hands and beats him to death. Hartigan then makes the ultimate sacrifice to ensure the young woman’s safety from revenge against him. A badass to the very end.
John McClane (Die Hard Franchise)
What other word than badass can be used to describe a man who takes on a skyscraper full of armed robbers by himself? As well as an airport full of mercenaries, and a city full of international bank thieves and another city full of other mercenaries? John McClane has leapt from the top of exploding buildings and boats, from moving cars he’s sent flying into helicopters, from the wing of a jet airliner as it was taking off (he also blew that up too).
John McClane has no real equal among other action characters. Unlike any character Stallone or Schwarzenegger could play, there’s a relatable humanity to John McClane. He can be seriously hurt and he is. Frequently. He made ‘Die Hard’ not just a bankable action franchise but a byword for action itself.