Movie Review: The Bruce Willis Sleepwalk Tour Continues with 'American Siege'

American Siege kind of stars Bruce Willis as a lazy, slightly corrupt, County sheriff in some small corner of Georgia. Willis plays Ben, a character so lazily rendered that giving him a last name was too much effort. Reportedly, Willis shot every one of his scenes for American Siege in a single day and boy does it show. Willis acts as if he’s paid by the length of every word, slowly slurring every line. No, Willis isn’t drunk, this is the slur of a man uttering lines he’s reading off a cue card just out of frame and for the very first time.

Watch Willis’s eyes in American Siege and you can play the 'which direction is the cue card guy' home game. A fun American Siege drinking game might be watching Willis’s eyes searching for the cue card at the start of his scenes. That’s certainly more fun than anything else in this latest late period Bruce Willis paycheck job. American Siege finds Willis at his laziest, hiring his friends and standing around while the action happens around him, seemingly refusing to shoot scenes with the rest of the main cast.

The plot of American Siege, a name that will never make sense so don’t bother remembering it, centers on three friends going to violent extremes to find out who killed a girl who is a sister to two of our trio, and the former lover of the other. Rob Gough is the ringleader of the group, Roy. It’s Roy’s first day out of jail and he’s teaming up with Grace (Anna Hindman), and her brother, Toby (Johann Urb), to start a war with a local kingpin, Charles Rutledge (Timothy V Murphy), with the goal of getting him to admit that he killed their friend.

What they don’t know but will learn as this story plays out is that Rutledge’s operation is more complicated than they are aware and that their friend played a larger role in that operation than they knew. The plot involves Willis’ Sheriff who is a pawn of the kingpin but is mostly just a harmless old drunk who goes along to get along. You can probably guess how all this ends, suspense is not the strong point of American Siege.

Then again, what strengths there are in American Siege aren’t readily apparent. For me, the most notable aspect of the movie is the co-starring duo of Janet Jones (Gretzky) and her son Trevor Gretzky, son of Jones and her Hockey legend husband. It’s not notable because either are particularly good in the movie, it’s just such a random pairing. The two barely share a scene together, Jones plays a hard drinking deputy on her day off and Trevor is a rookie deputy caught between his naïve devotion to Willis’ sheriff and Charles Rutledge, the town heavy and Trevor’s father. Somehow Trevor is dumb enough not to know that his dad is the world’s most obvious kingpin.

Were I to venture a guess as to how Jones and her son ended up in this movie, I would assume that Wayne Gretzky hangs out with Bruce. It makes sense in a Hollywood sort of way, Bruce was big in the 90s, Gretzky was the toast of L.A and Hollywood when he moved to the NHL Los Angeles Kings in the 90s, there’s bound to be a correlation between them, even if I can’t corroborate it with a very simply google search.

Everyone else in American Siege is Team Bruce including co-star Johnny Messner who rarely seems to work outside of Bruce’s late period flicks. Same for writer-director Edward Drake who has three films on his resume, Breach, Cosmic Sin and now American Siege, all Bruce Willis movies, all terrible, late period lazy Bruce Willis movies. And yet, even with a team of frequent collaborators, apparent friends, Willis can’t be bothered to work more than a day and definitely can’t be bothered to put much effort into that one work day.

American Siege arrives direct to On-Demand services on January 7th, 2022.