In the nick of time, Quentin Tarantino saw a chance to rescue Willis from these doldrums, and presented the whole middle story of Pulp Fiction (1994) to him on a platter. As Butch, the boxer bribed to lose his final match, he had a kind of guest-star function, and held his mettle with Mitchum-esque charisma.

After that necessary bump, he was rarely far from box-office glory – and growing critical respect – in the mid-to-late 1990s. Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) gave McClane a more profitable outing, but it was the same year’s risky Twelve Monkeys which tested Willis more: he was the sad, still centre that film needed to avoid collapsing into antic indulgence – the non-Terry-Gilliam element, if you like – and the romantic subplot with Madeleine Stowe felt genuinely mature. 

He carried on shouldering a lot of staunch, blockbustery hero parts – Armageddon (1998) is the archetypal one – until locating some of that melancholy again with The Sixth Sense (1999), his biggest ever hit, and a film which, again, needed more than his quipping cynicism to fly. He had to be ghostly and forlorn. What disguised (and therefore preserved) the big twist for audiences was precisely how unusual it was to find Willis playing such a sounding board – not a man of action, but a witness on the sidelines, a passenger even in his own story. 

It was inspired, counter-intuitive casting, hard to sequel-ise – but he managed something close to that in Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2001), and again, did it well. Before the slew of direct-to-video titles that have notoriously bedevilled his filmography over the last decade or so – leading to a special, mean-spirited Razzie this year, in which his only competition was himself – there were still some real highlights.