Talking About Bruno #3 Fortress Is a Crypto-Bro Fever Dream B-Movie That's Considerably Less Terrible Than the Other Films Bruce Willis Put Out in 2021 — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Out of Death and Midnight in the Switchgrass set the bar so impossibly low for my obsessive exploration of all SEVEN movies Bruce Willis released in 2021 that it takes almost nothing to soar over it.

Willis’ other films don’t have to be good to mark a decided improvement over those two low-energy, low-ambition stinkers; they just have to have anything going for them. Anything! A fun performance, a novel setting, Bruce Willis logging more than ten to fifteen minutes of screen time: that’s enough to set a movie apart from the rest of the man’s late-period output.

If I might lavish the very faintest of praise on 2021’s Fortress, it’s considerably less soul-crushing and terrible than the other movies I have subjected myself in this perverse exercise in cinematic masochism.

Of course Bruce Willis spends the vast majority of his time onscreen seated and looking ready for his afternoon nap. And the one-time box office champ delivers his lines in an affectless monotone, almost as if seeing them for the first time.

It doesn’t matter how urgent the sentiment: Willis always conveys a lack of urgency that is unexpectedly comic at times. The Die Hard star’s gift for wry understatement has devolved over time into transparent apathy.

It’s not just that Willis clearly does not care about the movies, his characters or performances: it’s that he can’t even pretend to care. He is beyond checked out, a paycheck performer invariably cast as a good guy with a gun and a deep love for comfortable chairs.

In Fortress Willis plays Robert Michaels, a widower and retiree, an exhausted old man who just wants to be left alone so he can enjoy his golden years in peace and quiet but who is called upon by circumstance to get out of his La-Z-Boy and kill some bad guys.

Jesse Metcalfe of Desperate Housewives and John Tucker Must Die fame plays Paul, a desperate young businessman who goes to visit his father for the first time in three long years so that he can ask him for five MILLION dollars for his cryptocurrency exchange.

Yes, five MILLION dollars for some cryptocurrency bullshit from a dude he thinks sells MRI machines for a living. And he’s somehow not the villain despite breaking his poor father’s heart by uttering the five words no father wants to hear coming out of his son’s mouth: “You heard of cryptocurrency, dad?”

Paul says he just needs a “stop gap until I can finalize a pending strategic merger” and instead of slapping the young man and telling to shut the fuck up, the old man agrees to help him secure the money.

In an earlier era, we knew a character was a bad person because they spent all their time yelling business jargon into a cell phone.

These days, we can tell that someone is a soulless fuck who contributes nothing to society and is better off dead if they express a strong interest in cryptocurrency, NFTs and digital assets.

Someone forgot to give the makers of Fortress the memo, however, so they made one of their heroes a total crypto bro who needs millions for his stupid schemes. They even make Paul a crypto elder, since he’s supposed to have divided his time at the CIA between assassinating targets and watching the markets, digital and otherwise.

That means that the suspiciously hunky young man could tell his father, “I got in early on Dogecoin” he would know exactly what he’s talking about, yet we’re inexplicably supposed to not root for these characters’ violent deaths.

In Fortress, armed mercenaries descend upon a heavily fortified retirement community for CIA assassins for the purpose of retrieving a 600 million dollar cyber-fortune, or enough to purchase three NFTs of a cartoon ape smoking a joint and a two second clip of Bill Laimbeer making a rebound in a 1987 exhibition game.

Do what I say or I’ll do a One Tree KILL!

Paul’s reunion with his father is interrupted by a multi-racial aggregation of scowling henchmen invading the retirement paradise for sinister purposes.

The weary retired killer is rushed to a comfortable chair in the titular safe haven, the safest, most defended place in the whole compound by bigwigs that include a turncoat general played by Shannen Doherty.

Fortress does not introduce its primary villain until it is half over. A movie starring a world famous icon whose resume includes Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys and The Sixth Sense makes a very big deal out of the fact that they snagged no less than CHAD MICHAEL MURRAY for the bad guy role.

The film gives Chad Michael Murray’s knife-loving, scenery-chewing, wildly over the top heavy Frederick Balzary an iconic introduction because it’s not every day that Bruce Willis and Chad Michael Murray join forces for quintessential RedBox fare.

After all, Willis and Murray have only made three movies together in the last three years: first Survive the Night in 2020 and then Survive the Game and Fortress from 2021, the magical year when Willis chose to bless his adoring fans with no less than seven motion pictures.

What a gift! What a man! Amazingly, despite costarring Willis and Chad Michael Murray, coming out in consecutive years and having “Survive” in the title, Survive the Night and Survive the Game are not connected. One is not the sequel of the other. The folks who title Willis’ late-period streaming fodder are apparently as lazy as their ostensible star .

This is a curious thing I am about to write but Chad Michael Murray blows Bruce Willis offscreen here using an oft-overlooked acting trick known as “effort.” While Willis seems in danger of falling asleep throughout, Murray brings a much-needed jolt of vulgar energy to the film’s second half.

Murray is clearly having an absolute blast playing an outsized apogee of pure evil, a wildly theatrical cyber-criminal who will stop at nothing to achieve his sinister ends. He’s seemingly killed at the end of Fortress but like a mad slasher he rises from the grave to wreak vengeance.

He will return in Fortress 2, which was filmed back to back with the first film, and in Fortress 3 as well. Yes, they went ahead and made a fucking trilogy out of this moderately engaging nonsense.

Will I watch these sequels? Probably not unless I’m professionally obligated to do so but I will honor Willis and Murray’s Matthau and Lemmon-style partnership by making Survive the Game the next movie on this curious journey.

It seems Murray had a very productive and prolific 2021 as well but not to the extent that Willis did. The Moonlighting star is truly that year’s undisputed king of lazily phoning it in.

Three Brunos on a Scale of One to Five

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