Willis was no stranger to Cincinnati’s increasingly robust production scene during the final part of his career, making four pictures there in the last six years that he has been active as a performer. In these Cincinnati-set movies that dot the twilight of Willis’s stardom, armed bank robbery is commonplace. The quaint, winding streets are frequently graced by shootouts, car chases and kidnappings; masculine bravado is never offscreen for long; and revenge is frequently a motive—greed, too—in ways brazenly recycled from countless movies that were themselves retreads.

These “Willis-in-Cincinnati films” were produced by Randall Emmett and his prolific EFO Films, a company which has taken its place alongside Cannon and Millennium Films as among the most financially successful purveyors of trashy B-cinema today. A former assistant to Mark Wahlberg, Emmett is the meathead inspiration for Jerry Ferrara’s “Turtle” on HBO’s Entourage. A recent Vulture profile suggested that he may be “Hollywood’s worst filmmaker.”

This steady diet of unambitious genre movies that are little more than cheaply made simulacrums of other mediocre experiences from the past has proved remarkably lucrative for EFO and Lionsgate, with whom they maintain an output deal. Aging Van Damme and Seagal straight-to-video pictures were the genesis of the formula over a decade ago, but Willis has taken on the mantle of Trash King through sheer volume. He has over two dozen credits that could be construed as streaming-era cash grabs, while EFO Films has quietly built a tiny empire on nostalgia for the genre’s halcyon days with Willis—whose fee is large, and participation minimal—their prime vehicle for generating it.

Some have noted, with a turn up the nose sadness, that these starring roles now stand as the final contributions to America Cinema by Willis, an actor whose services, at his summit, were sought by auteurs like Alan Rudolph, Barry Levinson, Brian De Palma, Rian Johnson, Richard Linklater, Robert Altman, Wes Anderson—and, of course, Quentin Tarantino, in whose breakthrough, Pulp Fiction (1994), Willis (playing a boxer who chooses impulsively not to throw a fight and, as an unlikely consequence, ends up in Peter Greene’s sex dungeon) was contemporaneously that movie’s biggest name.

But Willis does not “star” in these recent movies, and they have scarcely affected his reputation, given how little they have entered whatever we mean when we describe the “cultural conversation.” He’s often playing the bad-ass sidekick to the younger, less impressive action hero, or the shadowy, rarely seen villain—such as his corrupt bank President Huber in Steven C. Miller’s 2016 thriller Marauders, a moody, rainswept cops and robbers picture that is by a country mile the most rousing of these late Cincinnati films, and the one where Willis seems to be giving a performance that is recognizably dexterous; his face still moves with conviction and you can see the choices he’s making, ones that he and the film, despite its mediocrity, feel in control of. The movie itself is forgettable. The low rent Michael Mann vibes—from the steely monochrome of its color palette, to its ‘theft and law enforcement are just two sides of the same coin’ ethos—come through loud and clear. Given Christopher Meloni’s participation, I would forgive you for mistaking it, while flipping by on cable one night, for a particularly violent episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

In Brian A. Miller’s 2018 picture Reprisal, Willis is a retired ex-cop who teams up with a traumatized bank manager, played by the reliably wooden-faced Frank Grillo, to find a talented and deadly thief who has kidnapped his wife and child. Willis gets to cry over the life of a young woman he couldn’t save early in the picture while sharing a beer and some pills with his PTSD-suffering neighbor, in a moment that the movie self-consciously, and rather touchingly, thinks will elevate it above its ho-hum ambitions. But by its end, a ludicrous showdown filmed in the city’s waterfront park Sawyer Point that inexplicably ends in a bout of gunplay on the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge (the older and less famous cousin to the Brooklyn Bridge, situated on the other side of downtown Cincinnati), Willis gets to pick up a shotgun and kill someone, the only time any of these movies allow him to do that which the audience has paid for.

In the center of the poorly staged, not particularly tense “action” that dominates these movies, one might find a Grillo or a Michael Chiklis, a Jonathan Schaech or an Adrian Grenier; a star who used to be, or more likely never quite was. Willis is normally positioned off to himself, or with a couple visitors at a time, his visage haunted by a truth that we cannot see, and which the absurd, crime-soaked narratives of these films refuse to acknowledge: that the light behind his eyes is fading and that he just wants one more paycheck before he can’t do it anymore. Conversations are hushed, taciturn, normally a bit ironic; as the years wear on, in movies like Miller’s 10 Minutes Gone (2019), moments of him sharing a two shot with another actor have become increasingly rare, most likely so as to hide from view the earpiece through which the actor is regularly being fed his lines.