After flirting with smaller, more squishy roles in recent pictures like “The Assassination of a High School President” and “What Just Happened,” Bruce Willis is returning to action. The 54-year-old actor is interested in a slew of projects that will have him playing a former CIA agent, an FBI informant out to bust up the mob, a detective and both funny and serious cops.
Based on the Wildstorm/DC comics series, “Red” could see Willis playing a retired CIA black-ops badass who is forced to take action when an assassin threatens both he and his girlfriend. The film is being produced by Summit Entertainment, the studio responsible for the “Twilight” series. Willis’s deal has not been finalized, but it could be a sweet one since, as Summit production chief Eric Feig told me a few weeks ago, he sees “Red” as another potential franchise.
Not many fifty-something actors get those kinds of offers.
Willis may also play the lead in “Scarpa,” about the real life FBI deep cover agent who helped bring down New York’s Columbo crime family from the inside.
He’s also in talks to play a detective on the trail of a murderer in “Inventory,” set for Kevin Smith’s buddy picture/cop comedy “A Couple of Dicks” and soon-to-be seen in the futuristic actioner “Surrogates.”
That film takes place in a world where housebound humans interact via robotic surrogates. Willis plays (surprise!) a cop who must leave his home for the first time in years to investigate a string of murders. That sounds cool.
It’s interesting to see Willis going back to the kind of roles that made him most popular, much the way Sylvester Stallone has done with Rambo, Rocky and “The Expendables.”
There are very few real action heroes anymore, and even fewer who can maintain their macho into their 50s and 60s.
Alongside Stallone there may only be Harrison Ford and his fictional father Sean Connery. Does Willis have what it takes? Hollywood seems to think so.
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