10 Best Bruce Willis Movies, Ranked FSalinks

Bruce Willis may have gotten his big break on TV, thanks to Moonlighting, but it’s the movies he starred in that he remains best recognized for today. He was certainly prolific from the late 1980s onwards, and though he’s stepped away from acting due to health concerns, so many of his films live on. There are also so many, making his body of work an inarguably massive one.

Of course, lots of movies does mean a wide range of quality when it comes to those movies, but thankfully, here’s something that’ll cut through the lesser Willis films and get to the best of the best. Not every good movie he was in can be counted here (it would take a while), so consider this the greatest hits of the greatest hits; the timeless titles Bruce Willis will always be remembered and celebrated for.

10 ‘Nobody’s Fool’ (1994)

Director: Robert Benton

Now, there are plenty of Bruce Willis films that are worth celebrating that also have more substantial Willis roles, but Nobody’s Fool should still be highlighted, even if he’s not in it a ton. It’s a movie starring Paul Newman, and he makes the biggest impression, overshadowing a rather talented supporting cast that includes Willis, Melanie Griffith, Jessica Tandy, and even a young Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The narrative of Nobody’s Fool sees Newman’s character, Sully, getting on in years and having numerous small things he has to contend with and keep on top of, mostly relating to work and family relationships. It’s a somewhat relaxed, slow, but ultimately endearing dramedy, with the high-quality performances playing a huge role in elevating the entire movie from decent to very good.

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9 ‘Sin City’ (2005)

Directors: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller

Few comic book movies feel quite as comic book-y (for lack of a better term) as Sin City, which was released in 2005 and was one of that year’s best films. It has several stories all taking place in a mostly black and white and very film noir-inspired world, with characters encountering criminals, brutal killers, gang wars, and chances for redemption as they go about their strange lives.

Bruce Willis plays one of the most prominent characters, a police officer whose life takes a drastic turn after he makes a decision to save a young girl from a vicious person with very powerful friends. He blends into the world of Sin City amazingly well, showing that if he’d been alive and active as an actor back when film noir movies were being made, he could well have had a career starring in such films.

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8 ‘Die Hard With a Vengeance’ (1995)

Director: John McTiernan

It might not be the best in the series, but there’s a good argument to be made that Die Hard With a Vengeance is the second-best in what’s probably Willis’s most famous film series. John McClane is once again unfortunate to find himself in another sticky and tense situation, with the villain this time around (played amazingly well by Jeremy Irons) having personal reasons for targeting and tormenting McClane.

The thrills are consistent throughout Die Hard With a Vengeance, which scraps the confined settings of the earlier films and lets John McClane loose throughout New York City. Willis also has a great buddy dynamic with Samuel L. Jackson, and it’s the humorous banter they have alongside some reliably good action scenes that makes the third Die Hard film succeed surprisingly well.

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7 ‘Unbreakable’ (2000)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Unbreakable is a superhero movie, but not in the way that most superhero movies are identifiable as such. It felt a little ahead of its time, stripping back the conventions of the genre right as superhero movies were starting to get more popular, and quite a while before they became ridiculously popular (it feels like the 2010s was when superhero flicks dominated most of all).

That’s all to say that Unbreakable isn’t really an action movie, nor a particularly fantastical one, instead being more of a psychological drama/thriller film that looks at what having unusual powers would do to one’s life. It sets up an engaging conflict between characters played by Bruce Willis and (again) Samuel L. Jackson; one that culminated eventually in 2019’s Glass (though that film certainly wasn’t as good as Unbreakable).

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6 ‘Looper’ (2012)

Director: Rian Johnson

It doesn’t quite stick the landing, but much of Looper is genuinely excellent, with a wonderfully high-concept premise that’s committed to for almost all the film’s runtime. It involves assassins executing targets who get sent back in time, given how advanced forensic technology is in the future. The assassins have a good life, generally, but are required to kill their future selves at one point before retiring and living out their lives until they’re sent back to be killed… by themselves.

A routine is established, but things go wrong and spiral out of control, with the future version of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character breaking loose and running amok. It gets a little too small-scale and static in its final act, but the first two acts or so of Looper are awesome, and one of the very best from Willis’s later years as an actor.

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5 ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ (2012)

Director: Wes Anderson

Released the same year as Looper, Moonrise Kingdom is another great late-era Bruce Willis film, with the actor expertly fitting into a typically great ensemble cast (few directors attract members of ensemble casts like Wes Anderson). Two young kids go missing near the start of the story, wanting to go off and live alone, which then leads to numerous adults trying – and often failing – to track them down and “rescue” them.

It’s a pretty funny film throughout, as well as a sweet one, telling a coming-of-age story in an endearing but not overly syrupy way. Moonrise Kingdom ticks all the boxes a good Wes Anderson film needs to do, and then some. And though Willis didn’t collaborate with the director nearly as much as some other people (looking at you, Bill Murray), he fit with the filmmaker’s style well here.

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4 ‘Twelve Monkeys’ (1995)

Director: Terry Gilliam

Twelve Monkeys is part of a very loose thematic trilogy by Terry Gilliam, and can also count itself as one of the greatest movies the offbeat and (almost) always interesting filmmaker has made to date. It’s another movie, alongside Looper, that sees Bruce Willis getting sent back in time. Here, he’s a man from 2035 tasked with going back to the 1990s to discover the origin of a virus that killed almost everyone on Earth.

That’s really just the premise, because Twelve Monkeys proceeds to get pretty bizarre, with plot twists and unexpected events occurring early and then things just keep getting more and more dizzying as the whole thing goes along. But it’s an undeniably compelling sci-fi movie, with Willis being great in the lead role, even if Brad Pitt – in a supporting role – ultimately ends up stealing a good number of scenes.

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3 ‘The Sixth Sense’ (1999)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

While Twelve Monkeys is a “less you know about the plot, the better” kind of movie, it’s not nearly as much of that kind of film as The Sixth Sense is, what with its monumental ending and consistently mysterious narrative. It came out in a year crowded with great releases, but can still be considered one of 1999’s best. And, yes, it is still worth watching, even if you know how it ends.

The plot of The Sixth Sense follows a young child who seems convinced he can see and talk to dead people, with Willis’s character being a psychologist who tries to get to the bottom of this child’s strange experiences. It’s an expertly done thriller, feeling genuinely creepy at times and working exceptionally well as something that digs deep into the minds of its characters.

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2 ‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

It’s hard to pick between two iconic films when it comes to declaring one the very best Bruce Willis ever starred in, so maybe this can be a consolation prize to the runner-up: Pulp Fiction is the best-written film Willis has ever starred in. It’s a 2.5-hour-long movie that expertly weaves together several storylines, with Willis’s seeing him play a boxer who goes to great lengths to recover a family heirloom, even though doing so puts him in great danger.

Bruce Willis is a huge part of why Pulp Fiction works so well, but there are large stretches of the movie that go by without him, thanks to the structure. That means it’s not as “definitive” a Bruce Willis movie in the same way his single best film is, but it is still a pretty much masterful film that Willis starred in alongside a great cast that also included John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Christopher Walken, and Harvey Keitel, to name just a few.

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1 ‘Die Hard’ (1988)

Director: John McTiernan

Yes, this is the big one. You probably saw it coming, but Die Hard is a perfect action movie, and the film that truly launched Bruce Willis into stardom. He’d made a name for himself to some extent before 1988, but Die Hard gave him the chance to play legendary/iconic/unlikely hero John McClane for the first time, and it’s since become the role that Willis is most recognized for.

Die Hard pits him against an equally compelling movie villain in the form of Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), with the simple premise seeing McClane thwart a cunning group of terrorists/master thieves in a locked-down high-rise building, and during Christmastime, too. It’s got all the key ingredients for an action/thriller movie to work at the highest capacity, and it’s just difficult to get much better than Die Hard. It is Bruce Willis’s best movie, not to mention also being an overall seminal one for the genre it belongs to.

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