12 Monkeys
Why I Bought It
Spoilers for 12 Monkeys to follow.
As I've told y'all before, my love of all things Bruce started with Die Hard With A Vengeance back in 1995. Thanks to that one film, I was a Bruce fanatic. From that point on, if Bruno was in it, I was watching it, quality be damned (also I was 9 and couldn't exactly tell "good' movies apart from "bad" ones anyway). And so, The Last Boy Scout, Hudson Hawk, North, Pulp Fiction and 12 Monkeys all became standard viewing in my monthly Bruce Willis marathon weekends.
As you can tell, 12 Monkeys is a bit of an outlier there. The movie itself is a ridiculously weird time travel drama directed by Monty Python legend Terry Gilliam (Brazil, Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas), and I know for a fact that I had no idea just how unique this movie actually is, at least in terms of Bruce's career. But still, I watched it on repeat along with my other Willis VHS tapes and soaked it up into my tiny dumb brain, eventually upgrading to DVD, and later Blu Ray.
Since I was such a fan of this movie, I began to seek out other Gilliam movies as I got older. I very quickly realized that Gilliam is a director that I admire more than I love (don't yell at me, please). Simply put, most of his work just isn't for me (though I cannot deny the greatness of The Fisher King). My inability to fall in love with Gilliam's other work had caused a cloud to cover my enjoyment of 12 Monkeys, and so I didn't watch the film from beginning to end for a good 10 years.
And boy do I feel stupid, because 12 Monkeys unequivocally rules.
Obviously, 12 Monkeys is a Gilliam movie through and through, but I think it's also one of his more accessible films as well (much like The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys has two real deal movie stars as leads). In the not too distant future, humans have become all but extinct due to a viral outbreak that wiped out 5 billion people beginning in 1995. Now, those that remain have gone underground in a bid to escape the virus. Cole, played by Willis, is a prisoner who gets volunteered to go back in time to try and gather information about how this all came to be.
One of my favorite things about time travel movies is they each have their own rules. For example, in Back to the Future, anything you do or say can rewrite history or change the future. But in 12 Monkeys, you can time travel as much as you want, try as hard as you can, but what's done is done. There is no changing the past, and you cannot escape the future. The movie tells us this right off the bat as Cole is being prepped for his first journey to the past. His mission is only to gather information about what happened, because there is nothing else he can do, even if he wanted to.
I love this choice, as it brings a sense of melancholy to the film. That feeling is amplified by the ending, where we find out that the man Cole has been seeing in a recurring dream who gets shot in the airport when he is a child in 1995 is actually a repressed memory of seeing his future self being gunned down by authorities as he tries to stop the man responsible from leaking the virus. It's an appropriately tragic ending for this very bittersweet character.
Speaking of Cole, Bruce Willis gives one of his best performances of the 90s, full stop. Willis is vulnerable, intimidating, manic and restrained often all in the same scene. Cole is constantly being pulled in opposite directions, with doctors from 1995 telling him that he's insane and the authority from the future telling him he's doing the right thing. Willis balances all of this perfectly, proving once again what a truly talented actor the action star can be.
Special mention must also be made of Brad Pitt and Madeleine Stowe. Pitt garnered his first Oscar nomination for this performance as a deranged trust fund baby, and it remains one of his best performances in a career filled with them.
Stowe has the least showy part here, but that makes it no less important. She plays the psychiatrist assigned to Cole in the 90s during his stint in a mental hospital. She is basically the audience surrogate, trying to piece together the madness of Cole's story as she begins to realize he might not be crazy. Stowe is one of the great unsung actresses of the 80s and 90s, and her work here is no exception.
So then, why did I buy 12 Monkeys? Well duh, because Bruce Willis. Ok, I guess the real question is, why did I keep buying this movie, especially since I didn't want to watch it for a decade or so? I just always thought it was cool that in between his two biggest successes of the 90s (Pulp Fiction was right before and Die Hard With A Vengeance came out the same year), Bruce went and made this trippy AF flick directed by one of the most insane dudes from Monty Python, and so of course I had to have this in my collection. Thankfully, this rewatch has opened my eyes to the fact that this flick is one of the better movies Bruno has made.
*TANGENT ALERT*
Now, as I started to write this entry and dig into Bruce's filmography a bit, I was reminded of the fact that Bruce had been working with Top Tier directors throughout the 90s. I'm talking Quentin Tarantino, Robert Benton, Luc Besson, Walter Hill, Rob Reiner, Brian De Palma, Robert Zemeckis, Edward Zwick and Robert Altman. Granted, not all of those movies turned out to be classics, but still, Bruce went out of his way to work with these filmmakers, even if it just meant taking a supporting role or being part of a large ensemble. I mean shit, these movies starred Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, Paul Newman, Tim Robbins, Elijah Wood, Bruce Dern, Christopher Walken, Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep. It should also be pointed out that almost all the movies I'm talking about in this paragraph are either dramas, comedies, or very, very dark dramadies. He did this all while keeping up with Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the action department. Just another reason why my boy Bruce will always be my favorite.