Tubi dangles Bruce Willis and Michael Rooker over our heads in effort to get someone to bite
Corrective Measures will star Michael Rooker and Willis in a deadly game of cat and "other cat who would probably like his paycheck now"
Quick: How many movies has Bruce Willis appeared in over the last five years? If your immediate kneejerk reaction was “21, plus like another dozen that are in pre- or post-production,” congratulations: You spend more time trawling through the bargain bin of action movie and cop noir streaming libraries than most rational people. And if your answer was closer to “I don’t know, Motherless Brooklyn, Glass, and Death Wish?” well, congratulations to you, too, because you’ve mostly dodged a major “Let’s get those paychecks” period in Willis’ storied career.
But you know who’s not dodging it? Tubi! That’s right, Tubi: The Fox-owned ad-supported streaming service that’s been competing since 2014 for the title of “online video watching thing that most sounds like a baby gurgled its name out while guzzling down stewed carrots.” For years, Tub-Tub has operated largely on the content of others (as well as material from Fox Entertainment, i.e., the bits of Fox’s empire that didn’t get sold off to Disney a few years back), but now it’s decided to get into original programming. And by “original programming,” we apparently mean Corrective Measures, a movie in which Bruce Willis plays a criminal super genius nicknamed “The Lobe” who has a bunch of money that an evil prison warden played by Michael Rooker wants.
We’ll be honest here: We’re not immune to the idea of watching Willis and Rooker chew scenery at each other, even if the former rarely brings even a fraction of his potential star power to bear on these kinds of projects. But as an attempt to market Tubi as the hot new content destination in 2022, it’s hard not to find the whole thing as laughable as, well, the syllables “tu” and “bi”—especially when the press release announcing the move has the blind optimism to dub its release “an original movie event.”
Corrective Measures is based on a graphic novel from Grant Chastain; Sean Patrick O’Reilly is set to direct, while Dan Payne, Diego Diaz, and Tom Cavanaugh all co-star.