A few words about Bruce Willis

The action star is battling a brutal form of dementia.

I wanted to talk like Bruce Willis.

As a young stuttering 12-year-old trying to cobble together a sentence that didn’t sound like it was sent through a broken fax machine, I looked up to guys like Willis more than usual. Guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Willis had swagger to burn, and bad guys to kill. To someone trying to deal with an extra plate of youthful bullshit, Bruno was everything to this guy.

I remember seeing Die Hard with a Vengeance as well as I do watching Live Free or Die Hard. I saw them at the same (now closed) Kenrick Theater. The main attraction of those films, and their movie series siblings, is one man: Willis. Take him away and most of the movies he starred in weakened.

Take Pulp Fiction for example. Quentin Tarantino’s true arrival flick in Hollywood benefited from many things, but the underdog palooka with a hardened past raised that film up a few notches. While John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson get a lot of the credit (earned 100%), Willis and Ving Rhames deserve their fair share.

Their sequence involving a spilt box of donuts, samurai swords and bad cops took the film to an iconic location of peculiarity. But the actors sold the shit out of it, including Willis.

The near 68-year-old actor had to retire from acting last year due to a disease that rendered impaired communication and speech. This week, the diagnosis took a harsh turn, acquiring the label of frontotemporal dementia. In short, it’s a very bad kind of dementia.

If there’s one disease I am most afraid of, it’s dementia. Cancer may be an asshole, but it’s got a higher recovery rate than Willis’s battle. Dementia attacks the brain like Manny Pacquiao, firing subtle yet steady punches at its protective layers until it weakens enough to debilitate.

The family of Willis, most notably his oldest daughter Rumer, broke the news about the latest update on the actor’s health.

It’s no secret that the last solid chunk of his career was spent knocking out direct-to-DVD type productions that lessened his overall batting average. But that doesn’t really take away any firepower from his greatest hits, including The Fifth Element and Unbreakable.

While he earned plenty of deserved kudos for his understated work in Sixth Sense, I liked his tender yet superhero-like David Dunn in M. Night Shyamalan’s follow-up to the “I see dead people” mega-hit. There was something inherently earnest and humane about his out-of-nowhere comic book-come-to-life hero.

Willis’s secret sauce skill was pulling us closer to action heroes. Unlike Arnold and Sylvester Stallone, he wasn’t built like a brick shithouse. He was a regular joe-looking, down-to-Earth thinking shit-talker. He could talk. Man, the guy could talk.

I wanted to talk like Bruce, an old man who no longer has that crackling voice and ability to dominate a room. Like the cancer survivor Val Kilmer, a terrible disease has taken a shot at one of my childhood cinema heroes.

I hope he gives dementia a fight, or the very least finds a steady shore to rest on.

Thanks for the unforgettable moments, Bruno. Thank you especially for the underrated hit that keeps on giving, Tony Scott’s Last Boy Scout. What a picture. Joe Hollenback is like an even filthier John McClane, one who smokes first and punches right after. A wise-cracking, hardened action hero with a heart of gold.

The Bruce Willis Specialty.