Gasoline Alley: Yippee-Ki-Yech, the Bruce Willis Cash Drive Continues
By Liam Lacey
Rating: D
Why does Bruce Willis, the charismatic star of Die Hard, Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense, keep making so many bad movies? A minor journalistic sub-genre has grown up around the fountain of Willis direct-to-VOD output over the past decade, including think pieces in Esquire (“Why Does Bruce Willis Keep Making Movies He Clearly Hates”) and The New York Times (“The Bruce Willis Journey: From In Demand to On Demand”).
Neither critical pans nor COVID restrictions have slowed Willis’s output. At this year’s Golden Raspberry Awards, which will take place on March 26, Willis has been given his own category: Worst performance by Bruce Willis in a Movie in 2021. He has eight nominations.
His latest is called Gasoline Alley, the fifth collaboration between Willis and writer-director Edward Drake in the last two years. Typically, Willis’s role here is secondary (in her NYT piece Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote that his average screen time in these films tends to be about 15 minutes.)
The actual protagonist is Vancouver-born actor Devon Sawa as Jimmy Jayne, a reformed ex-con owner of a Los Angeles tattoo parlour. After a night out at a bar where Jimmy has a conversation with a sex worker, he becomes the prime suspect in the simultaneous grisly murder of four women. The main evidence is a promotional cigarette-lighter from his shop, Gasoline Alley, found at the crime scene.
Willis and Luke Wilson play a pair of LAPD plain clothes detectives (it’s actually shot in Georgia) who are determined to pin the crime on him. Wilson’s character, does most of the talking in a sardonic drawl.
For his part, Willis narrows his eyes and purses his lips, as if he’s got a car waiting and this nonsense is taking up valuable time. You can empathize. The script is a dazed, meandering, thing, involving drugs, pornography, neon-lit slo-mo, debauched starlets, car chases, soft-core sex scenes and loud gun fights.
To its slight credit, it never pretends to be anything more that more filler for the content stream. In making the rounds, Jimmy looks up a former cell-mate (Kenny Wormald), who has reinvented himself as the star of an inanely violent but popular TV action series, American Siege.
It’s a show that one of the crew says, “makes a dumpster fire look like Citizen Kane.” Tellingly, the title of the fictional TV show is the same as the most recent Bruce Willis-Edward Drake release, which was released in January.
Gasoline Alley. Directed by Edward Drake. Written by Edward Drake and Tom Sierchio. Starring; Devon Sawa, Bruce Willis and Luke Wilson. Gasoline Alley is available on video-on-demand from Friday, Feb. 25.