Talking About Bruno #1 Out of Death (2021) — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Welcome, friends, to the very first entry in Talking About Bruno, a supremely masochistic endeavor where I watch and write about all seven movies Bruce Willis released in 2021.

That’s right: SEVEN movies. Bruce Willis put out seven movies in a single year. In another context, that might qualify as impressive. Instead it’s mostly just sad. Incidentally, since I started this project I have seen rumors online that the reason Willis is making these films is because he’s suffering from memory loss. I have no idea whether or not that’s the case but I want to state upfront that if that is true, then that is very sad and certainly not something to mock. That’s obviously not my intention and I will try to walk the tightrope of delving deep into the absurdity and ridiculousness of these movies without being unnecessarily callous or insensitive to Willis’ possible condition.

For this project I will cover Cosmic Sin, Out of Death, Midnight in the Switchgrass, Survive the Game, Apex, Deadlock and Fortress, all of which were released in the magical annum of 2021.

It was hard to know where to begin because all of the above movies seem simultaneously made-up, generic and interchangeable. They also feel like the kind of titles that would be bandied about in a show-business satire as the kind of mindlessly violent fare a slumming, wildly indiscriminate movie star on the decline would resort to appearing in solely for a quick, dignity-free payday.

Alternately, it feels like the last decade of Willis’ career has been a sort of Action Hero Fantasy Camp where, for the right price, an inveterate c-list creature of the small screen like Chad Michael Murray or Mark-Paul Gosselaar can appear in a “real” movie with legendary movie star Bruce Willis and have the final project released straight to RedBox.

With 2021’s Out of Death, Lala Kent of Vanderpump Rules, who coincidentally was at one point was engaged to Randall Emmett, the producer of Out of Death as well as Fortress, Survive the Game and Midnight in the Switchgrass, got to spend nine magical days at the Bruce Willis Action Hero Fantasy Camp and the deliriously stupid drive-in drivel that resulted isn’t just an embarrassment to the legacy of Pulp Fiction and Die Hard; it’s beneath Kent’s dignity as well.

Kent’s IMDB biography brags, ”Lala Kent rose to fame on Bravo's Vanderpump Rules, and has since become a wildly popular media personality, and ultimately coined the phrase "Give Them Lala". This phrase paved the way for her beauty empire, Give Them Lala Beauty, and her ambitious, fun, and talented personality has led her to a massive following worldwide.”

Kent must be the Bruce Willis Action Fantasy Camp’s best, most dedicated student, since she also starred alongside the fading icon in 10 Minutes Gone, Trauma Center and, of course, Hard Kill.

Kent truly “gives them Lala” in Out of Death as Billie Jean a corrupt, murderous small town cop (but not, it should be noted, Michael Jackson’s lover) in a sexual and professional relationship with a drug dealer who helps distribute the dope she and her colleagues confiscate.

Then the lowlife with the elegant neck tattoo tries to record their conversation, hilariously using the “Record” function on his iPhone, and is coldly executed for his treachery.

At the very same time Shannon (Jaime King) is perambulating through the woods with her dead father’s ashes and what looks for all the world like a camera but is actually a video camera that she uses to record the killing.

This makes her a target not just to Shannon but to the whole corrupt police department, including ambitious Sheriff Hank Rivers (Michael Sirow), a drug-distributing scumbag who only pauses from committing crimes long enough to remind his underlings to disseminate his campaign signs, and his ponytail-sporting , coke-snorting loser brother Frank (Tyler Joel Olson).

Billie Jean tries to convince Shannon that since she’s a police officer, she won’t hurt her, but she loses credibility on that front by murdering a lowlife in front of her.

Meanwhile, depressed cop Jack Harris (Willis) is spending some quiet time in a cabin following the death of his beloved wife from cancer.

Jack is a sad old man with a disturbingly phallic head who just wants to sit and think in the middle of nowhere. His dispatcher niece encourages him to go for a walk and leave his cell phone at home, lest he miss out on the beauty of nature by compulsively making TikTok videos, posting Instagram updates and sharing anti-Fauci memes .

The weary cop stumbles upon the officers menacing Shannon, pulls out his gun and tells them he’s a cop. When they respond that they’re also police officers, as evidenced by their uniforms, the overwhelmed old man yells, “But shit don’t go down like this!”, one of many unintentionally funny moments in Willis’ sleepwalking performance, which was unsurprisingly filmed in a single day.

The grizzled cop and a pretentious young woman who says of her profession, “I capture images” rather than the more mundane, less obnoxious “I’m a photographer”, quickly form a close bond but out of deference to Willis, the film is always finding excuses to separate them so the Look Who’s Talking star can spend quality time off-screen.

The filmmakers make sure that Willis is never offscreen for too long. They’re even more diligent in ensuring that he’s never onscreen for long either. He has maybe twenty minutes of screen time but they are liberally and calculatingly spread throughout the proceedings to give the impression he’s more of a lead than he actually is.

Coincidences are invariably the product of a lazy, incompetent mind. So it’s not surprising that coincidences are the cheap gas that keeps this clunker running.

There are apparently six people in the rural town where Out of Death takes place and every last one of them either committed a murder, witnessed a murder or tried to cover up a murder.

Early in the film our plucky heroine explains that she’s climbing this treacherous path to spread her beloved dead father’s ashes but also to prove to him that she was capable of doing so, despite him giving her the EXTREMELY non-affectionate nickname “Little Quitter.”

Yes, Little Quitter. I can only imagine what his other nicknames for his poor daughter. Tiny Failure? Missy Never Succeeds? My Greatest Mistake?

In a literally unbelievable coincidence, a dirty cop throttling our heroine sneers, “Don’t you know that it’s time to QUIT?”

We then flash back to her telling Jack of her father, “He always said these woods were too tough for me. He used to call me his little quitter” followed by her assuring her grandfatherly companion, “I’m not quitting or anything. I promise.”

With the complete lack of conviction that characterizes his entire performance, Willis lazily volunteers, “Shannon, there’s no quitting. You understand? Then let’s prove him wrong.”

Shannon then addresses the abstract concept of fate and implores, “Just gimme a sign. Anything.” She gets that sign in a bad guy using the very same word her father used to make her feel like she wasn’t good enough and would never make it. This motivates the photojournalist to prove both her dead father and the corrupt cop wrong by succeeding in killing him.

Then the capturer of images and killer of killer pigs travels spiritually back in time to the 1990s, when filmmakers thought computers and email were magical and could do anything and uploads a file of Billie Jean killing her drug dealer paramour to the FBI website.

That’s all it takes to get teams of heavily armed men to descend upon the podunk Southern town, guns blazing, in a matter of mere minutes, to arrest the evil Sheriff with blood on his hands both figurative and literal.

Willis at one point literally phones in his performance in the third act by kibitzing with the evil sheriff via the telephone so that his character can technically be involved in a scene without the mercenary superstar having to actually show up

I was very happy with Out of Death not because it’s a good movie. As I have hopefully established in some detail, Out of Death is a very bad movie. But it at least has the decency to be bad in a way that’s fun to write about.

I hope that’s true of the rest of the movies I’ll have to endure for this project as well. I’m not asking for quality in late-period direct-to-streaming Bruce Willis movies, only that they suck in interesting and distinctive ways.

I also hope this dud gets a follow up titled Out of Death 2: Death Re-Stocked but I could never see Willis lowering himself to such cheesy hackwork.

2 Brunos (On a 1 to 5 Bruno scale)

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