When Bruce Willis vaulted from television stardom to film largely in 1988 with Die Hard, he seemed destined for a long run as a blue-collar rake the likes of which the movies had never seen. He possessed the incorrigibility of Cary Grant and the two-fisted prowess of Gary Cooper, but felt more approachable than either. Willis was no erudite and didn't try to be. God no. His characters tended to be tough-guys with moral compasses that pointed to true north, people who made their share of mistakes and spent the average length of a feature film redeeming them while going after bad guys who'd done wrong with impunity. He played well-intentioned f***-ups that we could identify with and maybe watch.

However, there was another Willis, who I think was even more admired (I use the past tense because, although he is still very much with us, he has sadly retired from acting). He was a real star actor. He wanted to step outside himself and play flawed people who found redemption without an MP5 machine gun. He wasn't above playing an abusive scumbag (as he did in Alan Rudolph's "Deadly Thoughts"), nor was he afraid to take the third payment as an alcoholic embarrassment for a reporter in a big-budget risk like The Fire of the Vanities by Brian De Palma. Willis wanted to stretch, but parts and/or projects didn't always pan out. In several cases, they were complete omissions. Fortunately, after taking it on the chin a few times in non-action roles in the early 1990s, Quentin Tarantino gave him the wheel part from Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction. As a pugilist driven by pride and analytical birthright, Willis was reckless perfection. At no point in Butch's odyssey into the underworld do you think he's going to survive, but as we now know, the men of his hardwood survive in Tarantino's films. They are winning.

A filmmaker as audacious as Tarantino could be responsible, even correct, in claiming that Willis' portrayal of Butch was the screen star's finest hour. But when asked by Sky Movies to name his favorite films between 1992 and 2009 (which, at the time of the interview, spanned his film career), Tarantino went gaga for Willis in a very unconventional superhero film.

If not Bruce Willis contractually owes a movie to Disney as compensation the breakdown of the unfinished "Broadway Fighter", It is very likely that M. Night Shyamalan would never have had the power to make a film as sui generis as Unbreakable. But Willis, by signing on to play a dead man in The Sixth Sense (you had so much time to watch this movie, I don't want to hear it), helped Shyamalan earn the green light to release his story about a man who as sole survivor of a mass train derailment, discovers he is a superhero.

In the aforementioned 2009 interview, Tarantino hailed Unbreakable as "one of the masterpieces of our time." He considered it a "brilliant retelling of the Superman mythology" and made sure to single out his former collaborator Willis as "magnificent" in the role of David Dunn, saying it was "Willis' best performance on film ever". While I've always felt that Shyamalan curiously underplays the film's central metaphor (that Dunn's powers come from his marriage, starting with the implication that he survives the train crash only by putting on his wedding ring), there's no disputing Willis. the greatness in this comic film with partial aesthetics of a Tarkovsky film. We live for movies like this and to see a star like Willis make them possible. He is missed so much.