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Looper currently holds the highest Rotten Tomatoes score
Bruce Willis will always be associated with John McClane, but Die Hard is hardly the only place where the actor made his mark on the thriller genre.
Across the 1990s and 2000s, Willis moved between time-travel mysteries, supernatural dramas, neo-noirs and action thrillers, often using the same understated intensity that made him such a recognisable screen presence. Rotten Tomatoes scores show that some of his most highly regarded work came when he stepped away from the role of the conventional action hero.
Here are seven Bruce Willis thrillers and thriller-adjacent films ranked by their current Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer scores, excluding Die Hard.
Rian Johnson’s 2012 sci-fi thriller is Willis’ highest-rated film among these picks. He plays an older version of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s hitman, creating a time-travel story built around the question of what happens when a killer is ordered to eliminate his own future self.
Rotten Tomatoes gives Looper a 93% Tomatometer score from 274 reviews, with critics praising its mix of ideas, action and emotional weight.
Terry Gilliam’s 1995 sci-fi thriller gave Willis one of his more unusual roles as James Cole, a prisoner from the future sent back to investigate a deadly plague.
The film currently stands at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the site highlighting its performances and increasingly mind-bending twists.
Willis took a quieter approach in M Night Shyamalan’s 1999 supernatural thriller, playing child psychologist Malcolm Crowe, who tries to help a young boy haunted by disturbing visions.
The film has an 86% Tomatometer score from 168 reviews and remains one of Willis’ best-known dramatic performances.
Willis appears as grizzled police officer John Hartigan in Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s visually distinctive neo-noir. The 2005 film weaves together several stories of crime, violence and revenge.
Sin City has a 76% Tomatometer score from 255 reviews, with Rotten Tomatoes praising its visual style and brutal energy.
Red is more action-comedy than straight thriller, but it still gives Willis plenty of the action that made him a star. He plays retired CIA agent Frank Moses, who is forced back into the world of assassins and conspiracies.
The 2010 film sits at 72% on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics particularly noting its wit and style.
Before superhero films became Hollywood’s dominant franchise, Shyamalan took a much quieter route with Unbreakable. Willis plays David Dunn, a man who survives a devastating train crash without a scratch and begins questioning what that means.
The 2000 mystery thriller has a 71% Tomatometer score from 173 reviews, with critics praising its suspense and slow-building twists despite reservations about its ending.
Willis returns to familiar action territory in Richard Donner’s 2006 thriller, playing a tired New York police detective tasked with escorting a witness across the city.
The routine assignment quickly turns into a fight for survival when corrupt officers try to kill the witness before he can testify. 16 Blocks has a 55% Tomatometer score from 158 reviews.
What makes this list interesting is how different these films are from one another. Willis was not simply repeating the John McClane formula. 12 Monkeys pushed him into psychological sci-fi, The Sixth Sense relied on restraint and emotion, Unbreakable turned him into an unlikely superhero and Looper used his familiar toughness inside a much more complicated time-travel story.
The Rotten Tomatoes scores also make one thing clear: some of Willis’ most celebrated performances came when he was doing more than simply being the toughest person in the room.
For fans revisiting his career, these films offer a reminder that there was considerably more to Bruce Willis than Die Hard.
