The Last Boy Scout (1991)

I saw this when it first came out on video. I remember thinking that Bruce Willis was such a bad ass. It seemed with Die Hard and this flick that he was now the preeminent action star on the planet. Somehow it didn't work out that way, which is kind of too bad. This film had some things going for it that Die Hard didn't, but for some reason wasn't the big success that everyone thought it would be. I can't figure out why not, except maybe what I said in the first line that I saw this as soon as it came out on video, not when it played in the theatre.
I also thought this should have been the movie that set up Damon Wayans as a legitimate action movie star. I thought that he played very well against Willis. At the end of the movie they even set it up to make one or more sequels. If they had made them, and presuming they still had Wayans and Willis, I would have watched them.
I wonder if the problem was that this film came out after Die Hard 2? The second DH movie had a lot of nice explosions, but it wasn't very good. Admittedly, it was a lot better than the third one which could have rocked, hell, should have rocked since it had Samuel L. Jackson alongside Willis.
One of the reasons this film didn't shine at the box office was definitely not the decisions made on who to cast as the "family" that Willis would interact. I thought that Chelsea Field as the wife and Danielle Harris as the daughter were great choices. But, I had to look in the credits to find out their names, so this film didn't launch them into superstardom.
Was this film jinxed or something? Maybe this is one of those films that will be looked back on by a tabloid television show in another 9 or 10 years, as the movie that ended careers. It stopped Wayans and Field and Harris from hitting the big time, it forced Willis to do Die Hard 3, it led to conspiracy theories speculating on why this film wasn't as successful as it should have been. You know. That kind of thing.
Every time I try to watch a Bruce Willis film to find some reason not to like them, or maybe it's not to like him, I'm not sure, I find myself liking it at least enough to not think of it as a waste of time and sometimes like with this film, liking it a whole lot more. Maybe I've tricked myself was some kind of intellectual bull shit rationalizations for why I want to watch Bruce Willis movies? Instead of just saying, "hey, I wanna see ol' Bruno kick some ass tonight." I invent some load of crap about trying to out the film as not high-brow enough. Who am I trying to fool? There's no one to answer to for my film watching. Not once has a librarian ever commented about any of my movie choices other than to ask what I thought of the film - they're pretty cool like that, though there is one who will tell you if she thinks a movie sucks and in fact will announce it loudly for the whole world to hear. There is no one at home to tell me they wish I had gotten another. Therefore I conclude at this moment that I need to get over myself. It is kind of ironic, because now that I appear to be coming clean about my Bruce Willis movie addiction, I think I've watched all of them.

The Last Boy Scout at IMDB