It’s officially Spring, and you know what that means, the start of baseball season, a gradual increase in tabloids printing Lindsay Lohan bikini (starting from three per week and moving to eleventy-billion by late-July), Joe Francis giving some poor girl from Iowa a virulent strain of gonorrhea while on Spring Break, and most of all, the yearly mediocre Bruce Willis thriller (not to be confused with the bi-yearly awesome Bruce Willis action movie).

Yes, it’s become quite the ritual to head to the Cineplex in the early part every year and partake in all the wonders that is Bruce Willis staring cock-eyed down the barrel of a gun, looking creaky but cool, and otherwise sleep-walking through a sub par suspense flick that even Jeff Fahey would have turned down ten years ago. From last year’s 16 Blocks, to 2005’s Hostage, to 2003’s Tears of the Sun, and to nearly every Spring since Cybil Shepherd screamed like the banshee she is and got her wish to end Bruce’s television career, nearly thousands of people have looked forward to a Bruce Willis crapfest in the first quarter of the year. And 2007 is no exception.

This week sees the release of Perfect Stranger a “thriller” starring Bruce, Bruce borrowing Burt Reynolds’ toupee, and the utterly useless Halle Berry. QUICK TANGENT: What a waste of an Oscar, seriously. Since we sat through her traumatic Billy Bob sex scene and gave her an Oscar for surviving his awfulness, we’ve been rewarded with the 1-2 punch of Gothika and Catwoman, as well as her sleep-walking through a mediocre X-Men 3. I give Hilary Swank a lot of crap for making Oscar winners look bad in their post-award film roles, but at least she was good to my boy Steve Sanders. What has Halle given us in the last five years? I’d also like to point out that she had to beg Bruce to be in Perfect Stranger. It’s true, I looked it up. She went to his house, knocked on his door and begged. And he grudgingly accepted. Bruce knew she was a stinker. Bruce! The same guy that made Disney’s The Kid, Mercury Rising and North. When you have to beg the star of Color of Night to be in your clunky Spring computer thriller, you may want to rethink your career choices. Or start considering a move to basic cable. BUT ANYWAY…

I tend to like both of these actors quite a bit (Bruce for obvious reasons, and Halle, despite what you just read, kicked ass in Boomerang, Jungle Fever and as a poor man’s Sandra Bullock in Executive Decision), but I just can’t get my git up to see this. I can get passed the film co-starring Giovanni Ribisi, nearly always a red flag for me, but I just can’t help thinking I’ve seen this movie before. Literally hundreds of times. And several of them starred these same people. Take Bruce in Mortal Thoughts or Color of Night. Take Halle in The Rich Man’s Wife. Heck, Lifetime practically makes its bones on the “woman infiltrating the office of potentially creepy yet handsome corporate boss who may or may not have murdered her friend, and oh yeah a computer is involved” genre, it’s their second highest used gambit after “daddy hit mommy at the dinner table and now she’s PISSED, and oh yeah she also has some form of girl cancer that involves her walking through a park as the leaves fall artfully at her feet”. Since I’ve been snookered into one too many bad Bruce Willis spring thrillers (hello, The Siege!), I think I’ll be sitting this one out.

But to honor Spring’s newest official tradition I thought I’d take a look back at the posters for some of Bruce’s more well-known debacles and give them some grades. One thing to note while I go back to the future of Bruce’s movie poster career, watch how his head gets progressively smaller the farther back in time we go. It’s like de-swelling of ego and fame. A reverse star-ectomy. Now that’s a procedure I’d like to see someone get on Nip / Tuck. Preferably Rosie O’Donnell.

Perfect Stranger

And we start with the newest member of the Mediocre Poster for a Mediocre Movie Club. Who really thought this properly sold the movie? Why even cast Halle Berry if you’re not going to show us her boobs? At least Gothika knew THAT much. But worse that Halle is what they did to Bruce. He looks like a disembodied head floating in the East River. Or like Clint Eastwood. The tagline makes no sense in reference to the poster image, there’s a terrible use of spatial relations (the entire left side of the poster is wasted space), and the title is straight out of the Skinemax cannon. If Bruce were still married to Demi she would have laughed at how bad this was. Demi Moore. Star of The Scarlet Letter and The Juror. Yeah. If this movie opens to more than $14 million, I’ll be shocked.

Grade: D

16 Blocks

Posters with a ton of numbers on it remind me of the debacle that was 11th grade Trig, a bad place to start for 16 Blocks when it already has the hurdle of Mos Def to clear. The only thing I like that it’s trying to be a bit of a throwback to the more design-heavy posters of the 70’s. Beyond that, I can’t tell that Bruce is playing a cop (aside from the clue that it’s, you know, Bruce Willis), David Morse is floating in the ether, waiting for CBS to send his latest Hack royalty check, and the transition from the image to the credits is jarring. The movie isn’t actually that bad, but the poster is terrible.

Grade: C-

Hostage

This has no business being a movie poster, and yet I kinda dig it. It’s too dark, it does not answer the question “Is Bruce the Hostage or is he the one holding the Hostage”, and to this day I don’t know if the white circle is meant to be a lens flare or the viewpoint of a sniper rifle. This looks more like the cover of a novel (which may be purposeful seeing as how the movie was based on a book). Despite all those shortcoming, I like that the poster is somewhat obtuse; it’s not suffering from Big Head syndrome, and at least it’s trying to create an iconic image of it’s star. This is the type of poster that would NEVER survive on the DVD, which I appreciate. It’s a perfect poster to be changed into a giant shot of Bruce’s shaved noggin with an explosion in the background, or him holding a big ass gun.

Grade: B-

Tears of the Sun

Have you seen the size of that noggin? It’s like a planetoid. It has it’s own weather system. I bet he cries himself to sleep every night on his wee little pillow.

There is nothing about this poster that works. Not Bruce’s ginormous head. Not the sell line “From the Director of Training Day” (which could easily have been replaced by “From the Director of The Replacement Killers”, so you know it’s bullshit). And especially not Monica Bellucci half in shadow and clutching a baby over her bosom. I call that bullshit the “Hot Girl In Search Of Credibility Trick” or “No Celebrity Boobs” for short. I get that this is a war picture, but c’mon, give us something to look forward to. Some cleavage or a ripped shirt perhaps? Anything to tease us to the possibility that amidst all the gunfights and carnage and Bruce stubble that MAYBE there’s a scene where they stop by a stream and Monica uses her dirty shirt to bathe herself. Am I really asking too much here?

Grade: F- (would have been a solid “C” with some Bellucci boob though)

Hart’s War

When was it decided that a monstrously over-sized shot of a stubbly Bruce Willis was the key art for all big budget military movies? And why didn’t Tears of the Sun learn from Hart’s War’s bitter mistake? I love me some Bruce Willis. I’m ripping him a bit on some of these movies, but there are easily fifteen others that I love. So it pains me to say this, but why would anyone want to see this movie based solely on a picture of his face? To start, the movie is about a trial in a P.O.W. camp, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. Secondly, where is co-star Colin Farrell? This movie came out back when he was fun to watch (pre-the awful Ask the Dust, a movie that even Salma Hayek’s bountiful bare breasts couldn’t save, and post-his frisky turn banging future annoying hero Ali Larter in a river in American Outlaws), so why isn’t he more prominently figured. And thirdly, the main reason we go to a Bruce Willis movie is to see him shooting bad guys and dropping cheesy one-liners. So where’s his big ass gun? Why the lame tagline “Beyond Courage, Beyond Honor”? What does that even mean? If I had designed this poster it would have had Bruce and Colin holding some crazy artillery and shooting some evildoers, with the tagline “Imminent Pwnage” sprawled above the credits. And the movie would have done huge business (but still sucked).

Grade: D

Unbreakable

Alright, now we’re getting somewhere. Bruce’s head size has decreased by a factor of ten, Sam Mother Fuckin’ Jackson showed up to look cool, and there’s a creepy blue light shadowing some scary figure in the center. I can get behind this image. Back before The Village and Lady in the Water, a M. Night Shymaladeefreakingda movie was an event. His name was actually a plus. And even though the poster doesn’t actually sell the movie all that well, I have to give credit to the individual elements being used to sell it. Those names plus those faces equals The Jay seeing the movie on opening night (and liking it more than The Sixth Sense).

Grade: B+

The Fifth Element

Alright, now this is a poster! Spaceships zooming around, Bruce sporting some blond locks, the chick from Kuffs looking sexy, Gary Oldman threatening to sick everyone us (everyone? EEEEVVVEERRYOOONNE!!!), some awesome blue lights and a sweet title. This is exactly what a futuristic sci-fi poster is supposed to look like. I like the cast, the art is intriguing and I want to know more about what the fifth element actually is. The entire marketing campaign for this movie was well done. I especially liked the teaser poster that was just a picture of space with the words “It Mu5t Be Found” on it, and the “5” was in flames. Very cool teaser poster design that was eventually aped by The Matrix. Now if only the movie has had been as consistently cool as its posters, we might have had something.

Grade: A

Last Man Standing

Despite this film sucking worse than Anna Nicole’s decomposing corpse acting in a Merchant Ivory flick (too soon?), you have to dig the poster design. And yes it’s a poster for one of the worst remakes since Rutger Hauer and C. Thomas Howell were too busy to come back for a Hitcher redo, but STILL, “Bruce Willis is the Last Man Standing” is brilliant copy. And the shot of Bruce looking tough in a fedora, shooting a big ass gun, with ANOTHER Bruce behind him bathing him in the light of gunfire, what else can you ask for from a Bruce Willis Movie Poster? I hated hated HATED this movie (yes, I even hated the Walken), but I love this poster. I even had it up on my wall up until it came out and sucked, and I was ashamed to be a Bruce Willis fan for the eighteen months until LeeLoo Dallas Multi-Pass fell into his futuristic taxi cab in The Fifth Element and jumpstarted his cool factor.

Grade: A

12 Monkeys

One of the most iconic movie posters of the last twenty years. It’s so good, I bought it twelve years ago and had it on my wall for nearly a decade. And it’s still in my possession, sitting under my bed right now.

Are you starting to see a pattern here? The more we go back in Bruce’s career, the better his posters get. It’s not a coincidence. As actors become more famous, studios become less creative about selling their movies. They stop going for the interesting design or the daring image and just slap a big picture of their face right above the title. I always enjoy early-career posters more than late ones. Another great example of this is Tom Hanks. Try measuring the coolness of the Apollo 13 poster against the dollface Tom in The Green Mile. It’s not even close.

Grade: A+

Color Of Night

As terrible, cheesy and pornish as it looks, I still like the poster. We had never seen Bruce in this type of movie before, and the filmmakers were smart to hide the fact that he can’t actually pull it off (hello, Perfect Stranger!) by throwing the luscious pout of Jane March’s lips right in the center as a distraction. By putting the controversial star of The Lover in front of the more famous Bruce Willis, we stop thinking about how utterly crappy the movie looks and instead just focus on how we guys all secretly rented The Lover to see Jane March playing a thirteen year-old who gets naked and throws BJ’s at her pervy Japanese boyfriend. And in the end, really, anything that distracts us from the fact that Bruce Willis’s donger shows up halfway through the movie to take the mantle of “Most Traumatic Male Full Frontal Nudity EVER” (until Kevin Bacon snagged the prize in Wild Things), is a good thing. Seriously, how did Demi Moore ever agree to let Bruce do this movie? I bet Ashton is payback for this low-grade big budget soft porn nonsense. I hope it was worth it, Bruce.

Grade: B

Blind Date

I’m going to end our retrospective on Blind Date, purely as a capper to my point of early-career movie posters always being better than late ones. I know it’s the only comedy poster I put up, but it still serves my point. Bruce looking trashed, shoeless (Die Hard shout out!) and with a dazed look, a pre-plastic sugery (and pre-Baldwined) Kim Basinger throwing her hotness right in our faces, and the exact right title for the movie; it all come together to make you want to see the movie. Now imagine this poster if it was just a giant shot of Bruce and Kim making dumb faces. It wouldn’t sell the movie at all. But a guy getting trashed by a hot chick and asking for bail money? That’s something I can relate to. Now if I only I could relate to more Bruce Willis movies this way (read Die Hard)…

Grade: A

Bangarang!