The Bruce Willis/Chad Michael Murray 2021 Cheapie Survive the Game is a Movie Like All Others, Particularly the 6 Other Films He Released in 2021! — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

To choose which Bruce Willis movie I will watch next for Talking About Bruno, I go to Amazon Prime and type in the actor’s name and it brings up his movies past and present. Needless to say, the juxtaposition does not do Willis any favors.

Willis’ 2021 output, and also the turkeys he’s been cranking out for the past decade or so, since the one-two punch of 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom and Looper gave way to an endless parade of interchangeable low-budget fare that almost invariably skipped the theaters for the low-rent, low-stakes world of direct-to-streaming, don’t just pale in comparison to masterpieces like Die Hard, Pulp Fiction and 12 Monkeys: they make stinkers like Color of Night and Striking Distance seem positively classy.

According to Wikipedia, “in 1994: Maxim magazine ranked his sex scene in Color of Night the No. 1 sex scene in film history.” That is one hell of an accolade, better, in its own right, than Academy Awards or Golden Globes. Maxim magazine, preeminent cinematic authorities, dubbed Color of Night the hottest movie ever. We must respect their judgment as final and conclusive.

Congratulations, Mr. Willis. I personally would not consider the sex scene in Color of Night the single greatest in the history of film but I’m not about to second-guess the discriminating, onanistic cinephiles of Maxim.

Those movies may have bombed and gotten terrible reviews, but they were released theatrically and people saw them, talked about them and acknowledged their existence. That is so much more than can be said of the vast majority of what Willis has churned out since 2015.

I chose Survive the Game for the fourth film in this journey of cinematic discovery because it looked marginally less terrible than the other options (Cosmic Sin, Apex and Deadlock) and because it reunites Willis with Chad Michael Murray (whose full name is Chad Michael Murray Robert John Henry Walter Phillip John), the pair with flair from Fortress.

Survive the Game is the fourth consecutive movie I have written about for this feature where Willis plays a law enforcement agent. In Fortress Willis sleepwalked through the role of a retired CIA hitman. In Midnight in the Switchgrass, he worked for the FBI.

In Out of Death, which I have almost completely forgotten about, Willis plays a retired cop and in Survive the Game Willis plays a police officer nearing retirement.

At this point in his career I don’t think Willis even realizes that he has the option to play characters other than lawmen. If a role doesn’t require a badge and a gun and he has to film for longer than a day or two or “try” then Willis is not interested.

It’s not just the profession of Willis’ character that inspires Deja Vu. The same producers, co-stars, production companies and supporting casts show up in the credits of film after film. There is a system in place to churn out these movies, an assembly line that has everything to do with manufacturing product and nothing to do with art or storytelling.

In Survive the Game Willis plays a cop who gets shot in the gut at the end of a long investigation and ends up in the custody of murderous drug dealers. His partner Cal (Swen Temmel) gets away and ends up on the farm of Eric (Chad Michael Murray), a veteran who hasn’t been right in the head since his wife and daughter died in a fatal car crash two weeks earlier that puzzlingly does not seem to have left a scratch on the man even though he was driving the car.

The tragic death of everything that Eric loved is supposed to be the emotional core of the film, the trauma that defines him as a man with nothing to lose. The film is constantly flashing back to the moments just before the crash. It replays the lead-up to the brutal deaths so frequently, and so slowly, that it quickly becomes unintentionally funny.

In these gauzy flashbacks, Eric, his wife and his daughter each sport a comically over the top expression of pure bliss at being alive and together that broadcasts that they’re about to die in a way that will haunt Eric forever and then some.

The filmmakers go so crazy with slow-motion that it looks like Eric wasted several hours trying to pick up his daughter’s stuffed bunny from the back seat and is consequently definitely responsible for his family’s death.

The alcoholic continually taking sips from the flask finds something to live for in helping Cal survive his encounters with Jean (Zack Ward) and his lover-partner, who are like Natural Born Killers’ Mickey and Mallory Knox minus the class.

I have to give Willis credit: he spends the entirety of Survive the Game wearing a suit that doesn’t look terribly comfortable when he could ostensibly be wearing flip-flops, Hawaiian shorts, a fedora and a novelty tee shirt reading “It’s Five O’Clock somewhere.”

That may not be much, but it’s something and my standards and expectations for these movies are so low that I’m impressed if they have anything going for them at all.

Willis’ character is ostensibly bleeding to death yet he never seems in any particular discomfort. While his partner fights for his life alongside Murray’s moody widower, David plays mind games with English (Simon Phillips), a British goon.

In a scene that IMDB specifies was improvised, English is holding a gun on a man who has been bleeding profusely for much of the film and should be on the brink of death, and the cop tells him that he will be taking his gun and killing him shortly.

There’s no real reason at all for English not to shoot him, but he apparently freaked out at being given instructions by the guy from Die Hard so he does in fact end up giving the man his gun so that he can kill him.

It feels like James Cullen Bressack gave the entire cast the freedom to improvise. Ad-libbed wisecracks abound, including Jean referencing a beloved line from the children’s film The Sandlot when he quips, “You’re killing me Smalls.”

To give a sense of Willis’ improvisation, at one point he really zings two of the henchmen menacing him with the killer insult, “You two suck.”

Survive the Game is the kind of movie Uwe Boll hate-watches and thinks, “My movies are better than this. How can I be the worst filmmaker of all time if my movies are better than those of top Hollywood star Bruce Willis?”

He would not be wrong! When Willis angrily inquires, “Why are you wasting my time?” he could be addressing the makers of every movie he released in 2021.

Survive the Game is the kind of eminently forgettable detritus that makes you wearily acknowledge, “Yep, that technically qualifies as a movie.”

One Bruno (On a Scale of One to Five)

The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out and it is magnificent!

Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!

Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.

I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!