Bruce Willis

Hudson Hawk was an action-comedy vehicle for a post-Die Hard Bruce Willis, directed by Michael Lehmann. Willis plays Eddie Hawkins, a master thief who, on the day of his parole from prison, suddenly finds himself blackmailed into committing a series of elaborate heists. The complicated plot involves the Italian Mafia, an evil international conglomerate, the artwork of Leonardo da Vinci, and a machine that turns lead into gold, but it’s really just an excuse for Willis and his co-star Danny Aiello to engage in various globe-trotting escapades of comic tomfoolery. The film co-stars Andie MacDowell, James Coburn, and Richard E. Grant, and unfortunately was an enormous box-office flop; audiences seemingly couldn’t reconcile Willis’s tough guy persona with the film’s slapstick comedy action, bizarre sound effects, and surreal humor. Musically, Hudson Hawk is an enjoyable oddity. One of the conceits in the story is that the characters played by Willis and Aiello often spontaneously burst into song, as a way to synchronize the timing of their heists. The pair sing several tracks, two of which – Bing Crosby’s “Swinging on a Star” from Going My Way (which won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1944), and Paul Anka’s “Side by Side” – are featured on the film’s soundtrack.

Like so many other artists, singer Ed Bruce got his start as a rockabilly act for Memphis' famed Sun Records; however, he was probably best known for his songwriting acumen. Born William Edwin Bruce Jr. in Arkansas in 1939, he cut his first sides for Sun at the age of 17. His career as a frenetic rockabilly performer was largely unsuccessful, however, and by 1964 Bruce had moved to Nashville to become a member of the Marijohn Wilkins Singers.

Mercury Rising is a 1998 thriller directed by Harold Becker and starring Bruce Willis, Alex Baldwin and Mike Hughes. The government creates an unbreakable super code, they think. As a totally irresponsible and implausible decision some idiot in the government publishes the code in a magazine as a test. They never though the code could be broken, but a 9 year old boy with autism somehow breaks the code. Some people in the government then sees the boy as a threat to national security and wants to eliminate him. FBI Agent Art Jeffries, played by Bruce Willis, takes on the task of protecting the boy. This was quite a decent movie I thought, even though I felt the whole premise was very unrealistic. The government people are so incredibly stupid and even a boy with autism can’t break an unbreakable code. Besides that, there’s some fun to be had and this was while Bruce Willis still had a name worth checking out. The score is composed by John Barry.