Our Exploration of the Seven Movies Bruce Willis Released in 2021 Comes to an End with the Staggeringly, Surreally Awful Science-Fiction Stinker Cosmic Sin
Today is a big day for Talking About Bruno, the project where I watch and write about all SEVEN movies the Die Hard star released in 2021. The first entry, on Out to Kill, debuts on my website and I officially finish the process of watching and writing about Willis’ complete 2021 output with Cosmic Sin.
I did it! I really, really did it! I said that I would watch all of these terrible movies and write them up in detail and I did! This calls for a minor victory dance! For nearly two weeks I ate, drank and slept some of the worst, most pointless and ragingly inessential movies not just in Bruce Willis’ filmography but in the filmography of any superstar of his stature.
I have now watched seven consecutive 2021 Bruce Willis movies. I haven’t watched a goddamn thing since this ridiculous adventure began. I wanted to plow ahead while I still had momentum going for me, to achieve this epically pointless feat or go crazy in the process.
I can now watch movies that don’t star Bruce Willis and were released in a year other than 2021! I’m free! I have liberated myself from this self-imposed burden! I am now experiencing freedom, sweet, sweet, terrifying freedom!
What shall I do with it? Watch Willis movies from years such as 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017? What if I don’t know how to write about other kinds of movies? What if I don’t know how to even watch other movies? What if this project has permanently broken my brain?
Cosmic Sin feels like an appropriate place to end this journey despite being a bit of an outlier in that Willis does not play a lawman in it and it’s a science-fiction/horror schlocker rather than a bare-bones, meat and potato action movie for the undiscriminating.
check out these amazing production values! Top that, Star Wars universe!
This has been a journey through Willis’ career but it’s also been a tongue-in-cheek celebration of a certain kind of bad movie, the kind that's painful to watch but fun to write about and mock.
With Cosmic Sin, Willis wanders unmistakably into Uwe Boll territory. It’s science-fiction minus the spectacle, a space opera with an almost perverse dearth of action, production values and logic, a stinker that broadcasts its epic badness from the mountains.
Also, it's not good. Cosmic Sin is at least decent enough to let audiences know that it will fucking suck by its title and an opening crawl that reads,
“2031—THE FIRST COLONY OF MARS IS FOUNDED
2041—THE FIRST ALLIANCE IS FORMED
QUANTUM PROPULSION TECHNOLOGY ALLOWS HUMANKIND TO COLONIZE THE COSMOS
2281—THE MARS COLONY FAILS.
THE ALLIANCE RULES OVER THREE COLONIES:
EARTH, ZAFDIE AND ELLORA
2519-ZAFDIE ATTEMPTS TO SECEDE FROM THE ALLIANCE
THE “BLOOD GENERAL” JAMES FORD DROPS A Q-BOMB ON THE REBEL COLONY
This makes Phantom Menace’s notorious “The taxation of trade routes to outlying star system is in dispute” crawl seem positively scintillating by comparison.
The first time I saw the phrase “Q-bomb” my brain immediately conjured up lurid images of Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton torturing small children at underground celebrity sex dungeon for the sweet, sweet Adrenochrome released by their dying screams.
The thirtieth time someone talks about a Q-bomb I also thought of the crazed pro-Trump conspiracy theory. It never stops being unbelievably distracting that the characters in this weirdly right-wing science fiction nonsense keep referencing what sure sounds like a weapon wielded by lunatics who think Barack Obama eats babies and also is a clone, since the original Obama was assassinated for war crimes at Guantanamo Bay.
You could say that a high-level government official with top security clearance known as “Q” dropped a megaton truth bomb that woke at least seventy million people up to the terrifying truth that a cannibalistic cabal made up of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in Hollywood and the highest reaches of the Democratic Party are sex-trafficking innocent children for their own sick pleasure.
Cosmic Sin opens with a pair of employees of a mining company encountering a sinister alien life form, one of whom is played by Trevor Gretzky of the famous Gretzkys. I don’t want to be harsh but Wayne Gretzky was better at playing hockey than his son is at acting in that his dad is widely considered the greatest player of all time and Trevor Gretzky fucking sucks at being a thespian.
These alien visitors act as SPACE ZOMBIES who take over the bodies of humans for their own malevolent purposes. I briefly got excited at the prospect of Willis sucking in a whole new genre—zombie-derived horror—but it isn’t long until Cosmic Sin devolves into a science-fiction action movie perversely light on action.
Gruff General Ryle (Frank Grillo) is called upon to address the situation and brings in both Willis’ “Blood General” James Ford and Dr. Lea Goss (Perrey Reeves), who once wrote a relevant paper arguing that if confronted by an alien race, we should fucking kill them before they have a chance to kill us. She now has a more nuanced take on war and inter-galactic diplomacy but the Blood General lives up to his name with his hawkish attitude.
Ryle, the Blood General, Goss, who used to date Ford until the Q-bomb incident, and some other soldier types put on metallic space suits that make them look like off-brand Transformers.
Think of Willis’ right-wing general as Optimus Past His Prime. Our heroes head off into outer space to kill all the bad guys before they have a chance to kill them. Only this time around it’s Grillo who is too goddamned successful and famous to be in his own damn movie.
they have fun!
Grillo’s hardass general goes missing for over a half hour and is presumed dead before he reappears and sacrifices himself for humanity’s sake.
His comrades, meanwhile, battle evil aliens who look like Renaissance Fair dropouts with metal Predator faces. Most of Cosmic Sin is devoted to reasonably priced actors wandering through rooms bathed in near-total darkness in an inherently unsuccessful attempt to hide the sub-Roger Corman production values and shameful lack of action.
Late in the movie Frank Grillo beats up an alien. It’s not much of a fight but it is a reminder that Grillo could have spent the whole damn movie beating up aliens but the movie instead chose to punish audiences with a heaping helping of nothing.
Cosmic Sin at least finds Willis sucking in a new and different genre. I’m no fan of The Fifth Element but that movie occupies a higher evolutionary plane than this deeply unexciting nonsense, which manages to make eighty-five minutes feel like a vast eternity.
I’m glad I’m done with A Year in the Life of Bruce Willis because it means that I can now watch other movies. Thanks for taking this crazy ride with me! I hope it’s been as fun for you as it has been for me.
1 Bruno (On a 1 to 5 scale)
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