Is Bruce Willis the biggest American movie star of his generation without an Oscar nomination? He’s definitely a movie star: To date, his films have grossed a shade over $3 billion, an amount that puts him squarely on the all-time top earners list without the benefit of participation in a long-running fantasy or superhero franchise. (Yes, you’re very clever, Unbreakable is a superhero movie, and Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and shut up).

And yet, unlike generational peers such as Tom Cruise and Nicolas Cage, Willis has never really been an art film guy. Glance at his filmography, and you can count the brand-name auteurs on one hand (or one fist made with your toes): Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, M. Night Shyamalan, Robert Zemeckis … does Terry Gilliam count? Forget about comparing Willis to Daniel Day-Lewis. Even next to fellow Expendables like Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, consolidated prestige seems to have passed him by.

One of the reasons that Willis has by and large missed out on actorly recognition—notwithstanding the Emmy he won for cucking Ross on Friends—is that he doesn’t necessarily have a lot of range, a criticism that’s been levied (fairly or not) at stolid alpha-male leading men from Gary Cooper to Ryan Gosling. Willis has done his share of quiet glaring onscreen, and probably played a few too many cops for his own (or anyone’s) good, but it would be a mischaracterization to peg him simply as the strong, silent type. When he first emerged as a star in the 1980s, it was by cultivating a persona slightly closer to the one Burt Reynolds had created a decade earlier, splitting the difference between a man of action and a bemused, wisecracking observer. What makes Willis so great as John McClane in the first Die Hard is how his character gradually channels his disbelief about what’s happening to him into a kind of aggrieved sarcasm: “Nine million terrorists in the world and I gotta kill one with feet smaller than my sister.”

Willis originally passed on Die Hard because of his commitments on Moonlighting, the hit ABC series that allowed the actor to showcase a knack for rumpled light comedy; the show’s snarky, postmodern style demolished the fourth wall, allowing Willis and costar Cybill Shepherd to directly address the viewer about the events of a particular episode. When Shepherd got pregnant in the fall of 1987, Moonlighting’s production was shut down just long enough for Willis to take the role that graduated him from sitcom notoriety into genuine stardom, although there was plenty of doubt that the latter would happen—even from within his own camp. In one of the most weirdly contradictory episodes of studio-actor relations on record, Fox offered Willis $5 million to play John McClane, only to de-emphasize his presence during the film’s ad campaign, as if admitting he was a consolation prize. Considering that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Don Johnson all turned the part down, that was sort of true.

The symbiosis of Willis’s (relative) underdog status and McClane’s against-the-odds predicament worked beautifully, of course: It was as if Moonlighting’s sardonic private detective had been dumped unarmed into the line of fire. It’s a beautiful touch of Die Hard’s script that the hero eventually proves himself worthy of his rival’s (sarcastic) sizing up of him as a Roy Rogers–style cowboy. As action-hero catchphrases go, “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker” resonates because of its mix of old-fashioned, Wild West exuberance and R-rated rudeness. Movies like Die Hard don’t get nominated for Oscars, but how many other studio productions from 1988 cast such a Nakatomi-sized shadow over their respective genres? And how many lead performances are as memorable? Thirty years later, Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man act is, at best, dated and problematic on top of feeling like shtick. Willis’s mix of chivalry, stoicism, and physical prowess endures, even through the McClane character’s increasingly tired appearances in a series of superfluous sequels.

Even leaving aside the redundancy of reprising McClane in 1990’s Die Hard 2, Willis’s inability to parlay Die Hard’s success into worthwhile follow-up roles remains startling. In retrospect, it’s hard to think of a more disastrous half-decade run for a deserving movie star than the one that included two of the most highly publicized flops of the era: The Bonfire of the Vanities and Hudson Hawk.

In theory, Willis was well cast in both films—the alcoholic journalist Peter Fallow in Bonfire was a figure of sardonic desperation, while the title character of Hudson Hawk flashed action-hero bona fides. Willis actually helped shape the latter role at a screenplay level, earning a story credit on Michael Lehmann’s eccentric genre mash-up, which wove comedy, mystery, and music (Hudson’s MO includes jazzy harmonization with his partner, played by Danny Aiello) together into an unwieldy package. But Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s epochal novel was such a troubled production that somebody wrote an entire book about it (Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy). Neither film is quite as bad as its reputation—and Willis is relaxed and funny in his swinging cat-burglar act in Hudson Hawk—but, combined with a string of uninspired-to-embarrassing follow-up choices (Mortal Thoughts, Striking Distance, and the Razzie-winning erotic thriller Color of Night) the actor found himself in career no-man’s-land. As he approached 40, it seemed that his best roles were already behind him, which gave his cameo in Robert Altman’s The Player a double-edged charm. Deployed as a symbol of mindless Hollywood excess, he was both in on and the butt of the joke.

Cue the surf-guitar riff of Pulp Fiction, a movie so expansive that it resurrected two leading men—Willis and John Travolta—while effectively launching a third in Samuel L. Jackson. Travolta’s comeback got more headlines, because his descent from the A-list was longer and steeper, and the spectacle of a middle-aged Tony Manero doing the twist was enough for Oscar voters to sign on as well.

Still, I’ve always thought that Willis’s bedraggled boxer Butch, who anchors the film’s second segment, is Pulp Fiction’s secret MVP, imbuing Tarantino’s ruthless, merciless exercise in genre tropes with a bit of a soul. Not only is Willis credibly lean and mean as a middleweight so dangerous he’s capable of beating an opponent to death in the ring (an act we only hear described on the radio), he shows a weary, exasperated tenderness opposite Maria de Medeiros as his nervy girlfriend. He also sells Butch’s decision to go back and save Marsellus Wallace from a trio of vicious rednecks as a moment of genuine moral reckoning. The framing device of the second episode, centered on a young Butch, introduces the theme of masculine honor, but it’s up to the actor to embody it in the midst of Tarantino’s wild, confusing, sadistic, essentially homophobic scenario: If the urbanized-Deliverance twist of “The Gold Watch” has aged badly, Willis’s acting looks better than ever, striking notes of stoicism and regret untouched by his fellow cast members.

The structural trick of Pulp Fiction that lets Butch actually be the one to kill off Travolta’s Vincent Vega halfway though the film—before bringing the latter back for a climax that’s set earlier within the story’s chronology—also kept Willis from having any real interactions with Jackson’s Jules Winnfield—a detail that turned their pairing a year later in Die Hard With a Vengeance into a pretty good in-joke. The return of John McTiernan to the director’s chair and the shrewd casting of Jeremy Irons as the bad guy all but guaranteed that the third Die Hard would be better than the second, and Willis (re)-raised his game accordingly, playing up McClane’s age and diminished physical capabilities while sparring entertainingly with Jackson. Still, Vengeance was only Willis’s second-best performance that year, trailing his terrific work in Terry Gilliam’s apocalyptic Twelve Monkeys, an ambitious reworking of Chris Marker’s seminal sci-fi short La Jetée that, even more than Pulp Fiction, found a temperamental sweet spot for its leading man.

“Wouldn’t it be great if I was crazy?” asks Willis’s institutionalized, paranoid schizophrenic James Cole to his psychiatrist. “Then the world would be OK.” Here, Willis is playing a time-traveler sent backward to the 1990s to try to gather information about how and why a lethal virus was allowed to decimate the global population. His foreknowledge of the world to come has left him in a catatonic state of sadness. The genius of Willis’s performance is how he inverts and internalizes the craziness of the movie around him. While Brad Pitt twitched his way to an Oscar nomination as the story’s nominal villain, Willis underplayed his character’s devastation and gradual acceptance of doomed, poetic heroism (transferred over from Marker’s original but given its own spin by Gilliam). Where in Die Hard and Pulp Fiction Willis had believably played men with the wherewithal to fight their way out of their predicaments, Twelve Monkeys cast him as a cosmic punching bag, bruised to the core and haunted in his every waking moment: “All I see are dead people,” he sighs.

That same line would pop up again four years later in The Sixth Sense, with Willis on the receiving end: One of the reasons that Haley Joel Osment’s declaration resonated so greatly was the mix of fear, curiosity, and empathy in Willis’s reaction shot. Viewed again 20 years later, M. Night Shyamalan’s stealth blockbuster has a lot going for it, starting with the director’s preternatural command of pacing, blocking, and tone (all superior to his tin ear for dialogue), and yet it’s unthinkable without Willis’s against-type casting and emotionally transparent acting, which resides in a different dimension from his box-office-conquering bravado in Armageddon (a movie that was basically John McClane in space, with the part of the Nakatomi Tower played by an asteroid). The mechanism that makes The Sixth Sense work is his Malcolm Crowe absolutely does not see the reality of his situation; he’s so gallantly focused on helping Cole figure out why he sees (or thinks he sees) dead people that he can’t see how squarely he fits into the same supernatural equation. The Sixth Sense was awarded with Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay as well as nominations for Osment and Toni Collette. Willis was passed over.

One year later, Willis had a joint reunion with Shyamalan and Jackson in Unbreakable, in which he doubled down on the weary, small-voiced performance style of The Sixth Sense and emerged with yet another superb characterization. Anticipating the 21st-century vogue for superhero movies while coming at the material from a graver, more mythological angle than most of the filmmakers who followed in his footsteps, Shyamalan conceived of a non-extraterrestrial version of Superman whose strength had more to do with absorbing punishment than dishing it out. The film’s climax finds Willis’s David Dunn clinging to the back of a faceless, orange-clad assailant. Shyamalan focuses on the dents in the drywall as David gets smashed over and over again, creating a perfect visual metaphor for an earnest, desperate, beaten-down savior—a spiritual cousin to John McClane minus the one-liners.

If we’re being honest, Willis hasn’t equaled his work in his first two collaborations with Shyamalan in the nearly 20 years since, adding mostly expendable titles to his filmography. There have been inspired turns here and there. His harmlessly gruff police captain in Moonrise Kingdom was a gentle riff on his endless, post–Die Hard résumé of loose-cannon cops. And whatever one thinks of Eli Roth’s nasty, reactionary, unnecessary remake of Death Wish, Willis goes all in on his avenging vigilante character, torquing the old McClane persona—the family man at the end of his rope—until it signifies something a bit more troubling. But his recent forays into direct-to-VOD fare—anybody seen Precious Cargo? Marauders? First Kill?—suggest less a continued joy in performance than a kind of clock-punching commitment to the craft (and the paychecks that come with it), and doesn’t suggest that he should be making room on his awards shelf any time soon.