Despite retiring this year, Bruce Willis has not seen the end of his on-screen presence. Neither have audiences. Wheels are in motion. Straight-to-streaming features are in no short supply and they are not in high demand either. Regardless of their desire to touch an audience with something moving or meaningful, they are set to release and consistently so. Randomly, too. Every other week, it would appear that Willis, whose legendary career is littered with these action flicks, is bolstered by one more. Pursuing the cash for a quiet time in the twilight years is an incredible venture that highlights just how easy to make Wire Room and films like it are.
For Willis to appear in fleeting moments of this slow-motion clad feature from director Matt Eskandari is more a suggestion of how quickly made they are than anything else. In their fourth collaboration together, Eskandari and Willis manage to get off on the right foot, with the stoic Willis revival in these features providing him with enough action and limited wordplay. That is the perfect blend for his latter days, a presence rather than personality. It works well and Willis is perhaps the best-realised of all these old hands turning in small roles between breaks at their holiday home and watching re-runs of The Wire. Wire Room on the other hand has the usual flair, or lack thereof, found in this submerged genre.
Even then it is keen to see just how far Eskandari is willing to go in trying to cut up the genre into something expressive. Security camera footage, blurry interactions and muffled shootouts provide some creative credibility that challenges the notion that this genre is just beating a dead horse. More than anything, it is surprising how much Willis is willing to give to Wire Room. He is seen in more than a handful of scenes, delivering dialogue and delving into the action past with a nice variety of scenes. Kevin Dillon is the other former face of quality featuring within. Wire Room is more watchable than most pieces slowly slumping out of this genre, and it is surprising considering Eskandari crafted Hard Kill just a short while ago. What a range of quality there is, then. From unwatchable to watchable, the genre grows as something that still has trouble with its lighting and its static shots, but somehow coaxes decent performances out of its leads.
Perhaps there is a realisation within that these performers could claw their way back into the fold should they provide enough decent work. Shelby Cobb makes a decent debut in Wire Room, a feature that, the further it goes on, the more it feels like an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, just without the crime. Deep intel, policework and pushing the fold are all the common traits at the core of Wire Room, but they are dealt with in a decent enough manner that would, at a push, warrant a viewing. If action as a genre is that starved of quality, then these post-fame Willis features are more than serviceable, or rather, some of them are.
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