(IMAGE: Tubi)
Tubi. 2022. Sci-Fi / Thriller. 107 minutes.
RATING: 3 out of 4
Despite the morbid awareness anyone watching will have of Bruce Willis’ deteriorating health when he made this dystopian sci fi potboiler, CORRECTIVE MEASURES could easily end up as the single most enjoyable B movie to emerge from the 18 or so films Willis knocked out in his amazingly prolific last two years as an actor before retiring due to a diagnosis of the brain disorder aphasia. Willis’ affliction destroys the verbal processing centers of the brain, making it hard to memorize and ultimately hard even to recognize written and spoken language. But because he remains a big international star of some value on a VOD movie poster, Willis’ team opted to place him in roles matched to his narrowing verbal skills, and to rack up as many paydays as possible while Willis remained at least somewhat functional, keeping his stardom operational–and bankable–to the last.
That’s a grim backdrop to what turns out to be a really fun movie. Willis’ halting speech and withdrawn affect are totally suited to his character: an incarcerated supervillain nicknamed “The Lobe,” who would be controlling the universe with his mutant brainpower if he weren’t both medicated and fitted with a kind of ankle monitor that negates his extra-human abilities. The Lobe is like the deathless Orson Welles character Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s “The Third Man:” he has limited but impactful screen time that seems much larger than it is, because everyone else talks about him so much. In other words, it’s a part that has been customized to let Willis contribute with dignity, while allowing him the centrality to the story his stardom demands.
If anything, Willis’ downbeat performance might play like a canny choice if we didn’t know what we know about his condition–an opting for subtlety in a comic book movie where virtually every other actor plays it big. You want over the top? Look no further than Michael Rooker, enjoying the hell out of playing Warden Devlin, the “Overseer” of San Tiburon, where mutant supervillains go to die. Rooker has ceased to even attempt subtlety in his playacting–his Devlin is a sort of petri dish mash up of redneck demagogue Huey Long and one of those beatnik blabbermouths who populated Hollywood movies in the late 1950s. Rooker’s glee is infectious though, as is the amplified emoting of Tom Cavanaugh as “The Conductor,” a villain on the edge of a nervous breakdown who is roughly analogous to Hatlen, James Whitmore’s disintegrating librarian in THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION.
If Willis is exiting the arena with a movie like this, he is at least among enthusiastic company. Making his live action debut, animated film director and comic book publisher Sean Patrick O’Reilly is clearly intoxicated with the cartoon possibilities of his “Lockdown”–meets-“X-Men” set-up. CORRECTIVE MEASUURES originated in a comic book O’Reilly published seventeen years ago, and you can tell he’s been thinking about this wacky dream project for a long time. From score to tone to the staging of action, the choices O’Reilly makes are almost always considered and frequently unconventional, in a refreshing way. There are traces of Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” in a framing device O’Reilly uses to give his movie scale, with feuding newscasters reporting on everything from the atomic plague that birthed the mutant population to the burgeoning prison riot at San Tiburon. It’s a hoary device but it works because O’Reilly directs his actors to be arch and believable at the same time.
The secret of Bruce Willis’ stardom was that he brought an everyman quality to the cannon fodder action movies that in his era were dominated by indomitable killing machines of the Schwarzenegger/Stallone/Van Damme variety. In some weird way, Willis always retained the common touch of a blue collar schlub, grounding even the most implausible plotlines with smirking common sense and an unpretentious attitude. This means in the right context it feels just fine to see him bluff his way through a movie that cost about as much to make as the catering on DIE HARD: WITH A VENGEANCE, and the fact that CORRECTIVE MEASURES is a Tubi Original streaming free with ads is just the Betty Crocker icing on the off the shelf mix made cake. Willis played his tough guys like they were the kind of people who snuck homemade popcorn into the movies by shoving it into their socks. Reduced circumstances suit him.
I’m sure there are movies buried in Willis’ Hateful Eighteen that will make me cry over the tragedy of a major star laid low. CORRECTIVE MEASURES isn’t one of them though. I know some are calling the usage of Willis in movies like this exploitative, but to me, a not quite as old blue collar kid who used to get mistaken for Willis because of our similar hairlines and my own crooked smile, continuing to work right to the end plays as heroic.
We’re men, after all. We build things. Then we die. The rest is filler.